VLVL2 (15): Exiled Royalty

[Dave Monroe]

"On the tube she saw them all the time, these
junior-high gymnasts in leotards, teenagers in
sitcoms, girls in commercials learning from their moms
about how to cook and dress and deal with their dads,
all these remote and well-off little cookies going
'Mm! this rilly is good!' or the ever-reliable
'Thanks, Mom,' Prairie feeling each time this mixture
of annoyance  and familiarity, knowing like exiled
royalty that that's who she was supposed to be, could
even turn herself into through some piece of
negligible magic she must've known once but in the
difficult years marooned down on this out-of-the-way
planet had come to have trouble remembering anymore."
(VL, Ch. 15, p. 327)


"exiled royalty"

Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr., was not born until the
sordid humiliation of Pynchon & Co. had been nearly
played out: 1937. His father, Thomas Sr., is the
grandnephew of the president of Trinity College (for
whom he was named), the one who wrote Hawthorne.
Apparently Pynchon Sr. was never in the high-finance
circle of the family....

To know Pynchon is to know his family's history, his
passion for history and historical method, and to see
how political consciousness of a historical kind
becomes central to Pynchon's aesthetic, becomes one of
Pynchon's penchants. Pynchon's writing evokes the
dispossessed heirs of the old American dynasty based
on steel, coal, and railroads.

[...]

In Pynchon's stories it is the disaffected and
disinherited with whom he sympathizes. These
characters usually have some connection with the Old,
the sacred, the magical. The disinheritors are usually
the hollow men allied with the New, the profane, the
rational. They are usually governed by some soulless
automatic principle: behaviorism, thermodynamics,
profit maximization, or non-violent
conflict-resolution process. The Old value culture;
the New confuse it with mass civilization. The Old
have room for personal idiosyncrasies; the New shrink
them away. The Old "are hanging in there with what
must seem a terrible vitality"; the New are alienated
from their human nature with atrophying individual and
enervating social consequences.

http://www.vheissu.org/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_2

http://www.vheissu.org/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm

And see as well ...

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm

Okay, situation detriorating rapidly at the library
here, so before I lose what little I have already ...


	
		
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