Pynchon, the Beats & "conservative American Values"

[Terrance]

Jerky wrote:
> 
> I always got more of a "let's get our shit together, people" kind of vibe
> from VL, rather than the "you lefties suck ass" vibe you seem to be picking
> up on.
> 
> But that's just me.

It seems to me that the assumption that P is a dissident Lefty or a get
you shit together people Lefty  is not supported by the facts of his
life, his prose, his fictions. He is critical of the both the Left and
the Right. VL argues that the two (Left and Right) are married, dance
partners, S&M lovers. The assumption that, with no way out of the bind,
Pynchon advocates or at least has personally assumed a Left of the Left
posture is not supported by anything he has written, said or done. Where
is TRP? I think he remains pretty close to his roots and where he
started out. MalignD can say that I am treating P has a fixed and
formulated monolith, but that's not the case. He does seem to move away
from some of his conservative-catholic traditional ideas (the the
reason, I suspect,  he did not include the very conservative Mortality
and Mercy in Vienna in his Slow Learner collection) as early as his
first year at Cornell and then, of course, as he describe it in SL, gets
out on the road and begins opening his mind and his writing, if not his
conservative irish catholic/Pynchon New England heart and pocket (V.,
Boeing). I'm not sure how deep the love bug of the sixties bit into Tom,
he wasn't a kid. Now, a father and husband, respected member of the
community, he seems as conservative as he ever was.