VLVL Rex Snuvvle

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> > Rex is a guilty white boy being played by the Black Party. Nothing noble
> > about giving his car away. Although Frenesi thinks it was a good thing,
> > it's stupid and foolish. Rex is trying to become a  communist or some
> > sort. So are the Pisks. But Rex isn't in North Vietnam. And the Pisks
> > aren't in Cuba.
> 
> But Rex *is* going off to Paris to hook up with what's left of "the
> Vietnamese section of the Fourth International" (229), and the Pisks are
> headed for a "bomb-making commune in central Oregon (259).

Yup. 

> 
> I don't think you can dismiss the fact that there are subtleties connected
> with the explicit references in the text to the Fourth International and
> South-Eastern Asian history. It's not the simplistic anti-communist screed
> you're trying to make it out to be.

Dismiss them? A simplistic anti-communist screed? Sorry, but I have no
idea what the hell you are talking about. 


> 
> And I don't agree that Rex is stupid and foolish for giving the Porsche
> away. For starters, the BAAD boys are calling his bluff, both in terms of
> his Communist beliefs and his loyalties to the Civil Rights/anti racism
> cause. They're manipulating him and he's put into a no-win situation, but he
> does hold true to what he believes in. And, in the long run it isn't such an
> enormous sacrifice anyway because he's off to Paris to join the BLGVN.

Rex is a fanatical fool and he's stupid to give BAAD his car. He has sex
with his car, names it Bruno. He  gives it up because he's a a
masochistic radical. Pynchon puts a rod through Rex and roasts him on a
pit of satire. Frenesi approves of his giving up the car. She tells him
he did the right thing. It easy enough to conclude from this alone that
Rex did the wrong thing. But he also kills Weed. He wants to kill
Frenesi. He's easily manipulated out of his car not because he has
beliefs or because he holds true, but because he a fanatic. And he's off
to join what, exactly? Rex would be better off if he got out of the
college world, maybe put down all that political stuff and read On The
Road, Zen & the Art of Porsche Maintenance, get comfortable in his own
skin again, but he's a guilty white boy. Pynchon is satirizing all the
white intellectuals who went to North Vietnam, Cuba, so on. 

PS I thought we covered the 4th International stuff, the May Events, the
Oregon Guevara guilt stuff. If we could get a look in Prairie's school
we would hear chants of Che and see the Panthers hung on the wall like
Stations of the cross.