VL to SL: Pynchon's Self-Characterization

[jbor]

I agree that the SL Intro provides considerable insight into _Vineland_, and
P's work in general.

on 14/4/04 1:29 AM, Terrance wrote:

> Pynchon and other post-Beats felt a sense of
> nostalgia and vindication during the hippie resurgence (1966-67, Pynchon
> was around 30). 

Yes, "there was" a sense of nostalgia and vindication. I.e. there were
similarities between the hippie movement and the Beat movement.

> Beat prophets were resurrected and rock and rollers started playing sax
> riffs on the their electric guitars, Eastern philosophy/religion came
> back.  

Yes. NB that bit about "the wisdom of the East".

> That sense of nostalgia and vindication was not felt because P was a
> Beat or a Hippie. It was not felt because P was part of some sort of
> anti-establishment movement. As a post-Beat, P only enjoyed a glancing
> acquaintance with the Beat Movement. He was thirty when the hippie
> resurgence took place.

He was heavily influenced by the Beat writers and by the "Beat sensibility"
which he discovered in the pages of Evergreen Review, and which he was
getting a taste of in the jazz clubs and in the Navy. He was so impressed it
got to the point where his "loyalties" became "divided" between Beat and
modernism. 

I think you over-read the "glancing acquaintance" sentence. I take that
sentence to mean that he was never a member of the clique of Beat writers,
that he never met up with the likes of Corso, Kerouac, Mailer, (Gaddis) etc
in Greenwich Village, or with Miller, Ginsberg, Rexroth, Ferlinghetti etc
when he moved to the West Coast. (Isn't there a story about Pynchon in
Mexico in the early '60s jumping through a window to avoid being interviewed
by Mailer?)

I think it's significant that he concludes his memoir with an account of how
he ultimately moved in "a positive and professional direction" by setting
"out on the road at last, getting to visit the places that Kerouac had
written about" (22).
 
> He got his Beat props and postures second hand,
> from the media of the time. He missed the Beat movement parade, he sort
> of jumped on the media band wagon or fad as it was fading out.
> 
> He missed the hippie resurgence too, but not because he was too young
> and
> unpolitical, but because he was too old and his politics were different.
> He does not say that the feeling of nostalgia and vindication had
> anything to do with having established some sort of affinity with the
> anti-establsihment Beats or the hippie advocates of extreme liberalism
> in sociopolitical attitudes and lifestyles.
> 
> As a post-Beat, after missing the Beat movement,  he came to see deeper
> into what was a sane and decent affirmation of what we all want to
> believe about America.
> 
> The key to understanding this part of SL Intro is that phrase about what
> the Beats affirmed about America. The Beats rebelled against the social
> conventions of            post-World War II America.

Yes, what they were rebelling against were the *conservative* social
conventions and values of post-World War II America.

> And Pynchon and the
> post-Beats were thrilled. They felt a sense of liberation as artists and
> men. They had a way to be cool. But as a post-Beat years later, he came
> to see much deeper, with a mature and political mind (not an unpolitical
> kid's mind), that the Beats politics (not simply the clothes, the music,
> the talk, the non-conformity) were quite sane, were in fact, a decent
> affirmation of American values. To affirm american values one needs to
> be conservative. Conservative in what sense?

This is the part that doesn't seem justified by what's actually written in
the Intro. He eventually came "to see deeper" into the Beat sensibility;
that doesn't mean that he saw that it was really endorsing conservative '50s
values. It means that he saw beyond the props and postures to the values
underneath: he recognised that it was a rebellion against the strait-laced
conservatism and the oppressive political and social arrangements of the
McCarthy/Eisenhower years. Previously he had been an "unpolitical '50s
student"; he became politicised by virtue of his *literary* acquaintance
with the Beat writers.

I think the stumbling block here is the question of who "we" are, and of
what it is that "we all want to believe about American values". I think he's
talking about the American Revolution and the Declaration of Independence.

best