VLVL Rex Snuvvle

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, February 11, 2004 9:55 PM
Subject: Re: VLVL Rex Snuvvle
>
> on 12/2/04 7:07 AM, Terrance wrote:
>
> > 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.
>

I don't know if he is satirizing all of them but clearly those ones who,
like Rex, had adopted radicalism merely as a "chick" attitude. A communist
with a Porsche obviously is ridiculous, you cannot trust such a person. How
does _Bruno_ fit into this monkish, nearly Buddhist ideology? You can't
drive a *Parsh* and be a revolutionary of this kind at the same time:

"Rex himself saw the Revolution as a kind of progressive abstinence (...)
you gave up your privacy, freedom of movement, access to money (...) the
final forms of abstinence from any life at all free of pain." (229-230)

The Brothers are right. It's very contradictory, so:

"See you put that *Parsh* up where your mouth's at."
It is difficult in this era of greed and its ennoblement to recall the
naturalness and grace with which Rex (...)." (231)

But people will always do (or say) the wrong things (the things you want
them to do) if you manage to bring them in that kind of no-win situation in
a discussion.

I agree that he did the wrong thing, and that he did so because he's a
fanatic. Without that fanaticism he himself just would be a "sunshine
revolutionary." I agree that he instead should have left politics at all.
The novel shows how the Revolution is spoiled by people doing it for the
wrong reasons and by fanatics; how easily any movement can be broken up with
the help of agent provocateurs launched near the (necessary) fanatics of
that movement. Why are they necessary? Because they are able to spell out
what Terrance called the "truth" of the situation in his other post:

"You're up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking crusades,
retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian Capitalist
Faith intact, mentor to protégé, generation to generation, living inside
their power, convinced they're immune to all history the rest of us have to
suffer. They are bad, bad's they come, but that still doesn't make us good,
not 100%, Weed." (232)

Otto