VLVL What's it all "about"?

[jbor]

> When we read VL we simply can not ignore the fact that Pynchon has
> deliberately focused his narrative on Work in America

I disagree: this is reductio ad absurdum.

> In the brief history sketches of partners
> Frenesi  and DL, Pynchon connects the post-JFK period and the Reagan
> 1984 period with the post W.W.II or Cold War anti-Communist purge, then
> the Hoover FBI period that begins in 1924.

There is no causal connection made between the different periods. Through
the depictions of the political activities of Frenesi's parents and
grandparents Pynchon is able to address other pivotal moments in U.S.
history when conservative government and its agents brutally and/or
insidiously repressed opposition organisations (the IWW, the anti-WW2
movement, the Hollywood unions of the '50s, the Student Movement of the
'60s) which looked to be gaining a foothold.

> Motivated by white guilt (Rex) and hate of White America (the Pisks),
> the New Left wrongly attached themselves to Black Militants (BAAD) and
> artificially transposed to America the "exemplary acts" of Ché Guevara's
> rural guerrillas (24fps).

This is silly. Rex isn't "motivated by white guilt" at all, and what Elliot
X says ("The Man's gun don't have no blond option on it, just automatic,
semi-automatic, and black" and "we don't have no fuckin' choice" 231)
illustrates how the escalation of violence began with the government and
police, and how racism and marginalisation sped along the fragmentation of
the '60s Movement. The slogan from Che's pamphlet which 24fps adopt is
"Wherever death may surprise us": again, this call to constancy is a
response to the violent tactics which have been initiated by the government
and police (202-3).

"Uhuru", by the way, means "freedom" in Swahili, and is used in the name of
various world-wide organisations devoted to democracy and equity for African
peoples, including an organisation which began in California in 1981:

http://www.supportuhuru.org/pies/oakland/about_uhuru_oak.html

http://www.inpdumchicago.com/

It is alo the derivation of "Uhura", Nichelle Nicholls' character's name in
the original _Star Trek_ (cf. 370.27-32).

> Unwilling to work in White Communities
> (Trasero County) in a long, slow, and difficult organizing process that
> was necessary in view of the unreceptive attitude of the majority of the
> American Population,

Wha?! Page? Passage?

> they allied themselves with  what they, in their
> ignorance of American Labor history, believed, was a world wide
> revolutionary movement, but  had been the agent of violence and
> polarization in the USA in three pervious struggles, the Communists.

Yeah, watch out for those reds under the beds!

best