VLVL the collapse of the Youth Movement

jbor jbor at bigpond.com
Thu Feb 19 01:42:29 CST 2004


> to show how a Movement which abandoned its common causes and its common
> set of values

Precisely. And two of the causes which the novel identifies as having been
abandoned are the Civil Rights cause and the anti-Vietnam War cause.

        War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American
        politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and
        death, all must have been off on some other planet. (38)

The abandonment of these causes went hand in hand with the Movement's
collapse.

The Port Huron Statement of 1962, though not referred to in the text, is an
case in point: as well as advocating "participatory democracy" it expressed
concerns about racism, the Cold War, and public apathy. The first half of
the decade saw Civil Rights and anti-War, along with Free Speech, as the
common set of values which unified the Movement: the Greensboro sit-in,
Freedom Rides, Congress of Racial Equality, Mississippi Voter program etc
etc. In the period the novel focuses on these causes have become (or been)
marginalised.

> The false
> notion that the novel takes sides, for example, that Pynchon agrees with
> Eliot X's ridiculous argument about the Man's gun, while clearly
> targeting blacks, is  not also killing whites, misses the point.

Typical straw man attack: no-one has argued that "the novel takes sides" in
this way. Elliot X's arguments about "[t]he Man's gun" and that "we don't
have the fuckin' choice" (231) address exactly the same situation Pynchon
identifies and empathises with in 'A Journey Into the Mind of Watts' (1966):

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html

Similarly, Rex knows "the truth" about the U.S. invasion of Vietnam (207),
and is largely motivated by that knowledge. These are important points,
explicit in the text.

> VL doesn't claim that Nixon was a fascist or that Reagan is a fascist,

I think the narrator refers to "the Nixonian Repression" and "the Nixonian
Reaction" on a number of occasions, and Reagan doesn't cop too many bouquets
either. I think it's ridiculous to continue to claim that Pynchon, in
_Vineland_ in particular, is an advocate of American Conservatism -- "the
Christian Capitalist Faith" (232) -- or to try to imply that he is an
apologist for Nixon and/or Reagan.

best



> The "New Left," whatever one may say it about it, was clearly never a
> coherent analysis of what was "wrong" or strategy for how to "fix" it.
> In VL we have a parody of the implosion of SDS and the American New Left
> Student Movement (1967-1970). Pynchon mixes up the socialists,
> anarchists, communists, humanist liberals, separatist militants,
> visionary hippies, blacks and whites, surfers and panthers,  and so on,
> not only because the diversity of the New Left is a fact of history, but
> to show how a Movement which abandoned its common causes and its common
> set of values, was easily crushed by a reactionary government and ended
> up bickering itself into fragments and blowing itself up. The false
> notion that the novel takes sides, for example, that Pynchon agrees with
> Eliot X's ridiculous argument about the Man's gun, while clearly
> targeting blacks, is  not also killing whites, misses the point. Rex is
> trying to get people together and Eliot X is bickering. He's divisive.
> The New Left in America started out with an American Democratic and
> Pragmatic Perception of the gap between the actual reality of daily life
> in America and the potentiality of the human spirit existing in the
> people. 
> VL doesn't claim that Nixon was a fascist or that Reagan is a fascist,
> but it exposes the  contradiction between the brutal and dehumanizing
> reality of advanced corporate capitalism and the liberating potential of
> the democratic institutions that might have saved us from fragmentation
> and specialization and meaningless service economy toil, from
> cybernation and automation and alienation. Of course, the urgency that
> VL lacks, the bomb of GR, deflates its claim that our humanity is at
> stake. Or does it?




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