VL to SL: Pynchon's Self-Characterization

[jbor]

on 13/4/04 7:22 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> 
>> 
>> I think that in the _SL_ Intro he characterises himself as becoming more
>> socially, culturally and politically aware through his exposure to Beat
>> culture and ideas, and as maturing from being an "unpolitical '50s student"
>> into someone who "saw deeper" into the Beat sensibility of the times and who
>> embraced both its trappings (jazz music, drugs) and its "values"
>> (anti-Establishment). I can't see how the first wave of the "hippie
>> resurgence" could possibly have "vindicated" any brand of conservatism.
> 
> 
> No, this is not what he says at all. Pynchon says,
> 
> "I enjoyed only a glancing acquaintance with the Beat movement."

Read the next four sentences, and the paragraph on the following page where
he says that, as "post-Beats", they "adopted Beat postures and props", and
then where he talks of the "sense of nostalgia and vindication" that came
along with the "hippie resurgence". I actually think it's your categories
(conservative and Catholic) which are misleading and problematic. Can you
provide even one quote, or one source, to substantiate these labels you're
trying to pin him with.

best
 
> He goes on to describe his generation of writers, the post-Beats and the
> post-Beat time when loyalties were divided between what was being taught
> in college (modernist tradition) and what was seeping in from the world,
> Beats and so on ... when his  generation (not the Beat generation) of
> post-Beat writers were onlookers and consumers, getting everything
> second hand from the media, adopting Beat postures and props. He says
> nothing about the Beat values equaling anti-establishment. He would be
> in error if he did say this. And he says that as post-Beats, not Beats,
> but post-Beats, his generation of writers came came to see "deeper into
> what, after all, was a sane and decent affirmation of of what we all
> want to believe about American values. An excellent student of the
> Beats, a post-Beat writer, Pynchon is talking about the sanity of those
> who tried to convince the American people that the rulers of the nation
> were insane Rocketmen launching a  MIC paranoid culture into a theatre
> of everlasting war and nuclear destruction. Read Ginsberg. Poem Rocket,
> Howl, America, all the poems in Parts II, IV, V, his collected poems
> 1947-1980.