Pynchon and Rorty

[Dave Monroe]

>From Richard Rorty, Achieving our Country: Leftist
Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard UP, 1998), Ch. 1, "American National Pride:
Whitman and Dewey," pp. 1-38 ...

   "Snow Crash [by Neal Stephenson] capitalizes on the
widespread belief that giant corporation, and a
shadowy behind-the-scenes government acting as an
agent for the corporations, now make all the important
decisions.  This belief finds popular expression in
popular thrilers like Richard Condon's The Manchurian
Candidate and Winter Kills, as well as in more
ambitious works like Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and
Norman Mailer's Harlot's Ghost.  The view thatbthe
visible government is just a false front is a
plausible extrapolation from the fact that we are
living in a second Gilded Age: even Mark Twain might
have been startled by the shamelesness with which our
politicians now sell themselves.
   "Novels like Stephenson's, Condon's, and Pynchon's
are novels not of social protest but of rueful
acquiescence in the end of American hopes...." (pp.
5-6) 

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/RORACH.html

A few weeks ago in the German newspaper taz an
interview with Richard Rorty was published. His
argument was in favor of a "more practical, more
economically based left-wing approach to politics". He
said that the contemporary left-wing movement in the
USA would focus too much on ethnic-minority- and
gender-issues, affirmative action etc., which made it
easy for people like Buchanan to dismiss them as crazy
extremists, confused postmodernists, homosexuals and
atheists. (A very strange argument, I think, because
what is Rorty's agenda? To become friends with
Buchanan?) 

Apart from that, he argued that US-leftists preferred
to talk about "the system" on a fundamental level,
inspired by, for example, Foucault or Baudrillard,
instead of discussing worker's wages and health
security. He called Foucault's theory of power a kind
of philosophical or academic "gothicism" (because it
is based upon an abstract notion of power that is
always out to get you, I guess, just like Pynchon's
"THEY"). The interviewer then asked him whether he was
referring to a "Thomas-Pynchon-like
view-of-the-world", and Rorty answered: "Exactly.
Pynchon is absolutely typical for the concept of an
America where nothing really is important because
everything is artificial anyway. What he describes is
not a real country, but a facade built by the ones in
power." I do send this mainly as a bit of information.
But as I do know next to nothing about Rorty, his
philosophy and his reputation among Pynchon-readers, I
would of course be curious as to what you think.

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9708&msg=18962&sort=date

And on said "gothicism," see ...

Edmundson, Mark.  Nightmare on Main Street:
   Angels, Sadomasochism and the Culture of Gothic.
   Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/EDMNIG.html

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> Might Rorty's point of departure from Pynchon (and
> postmodernism generally) be that dissidence from
> the official Left (i.e. the Democrats) is in fact a
> vote for the Republicans? Pragmatically speaking,
> that is.

Me, I don't blame Nader ...
 
> With Pynchon sticking firm to the line that the
> lesser of two evils is still an evil?

But that might yet be the case ...

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