VLVL What is Pynchon's attitude towards the "traveling Movement co-ordinators"?
jbor
jbor at bigpond.com
Tue Jan 6 18:27:34 CST 2004
But when traveling Movement co-ordinators began to show up,
they could only shake their heads and blink, as if trying to surface
from a dream. None of these kids had been doing any analysis. Not
only was nobody thinking about the real situation, nobody was even
brainlessly reacting to it. Instead they were busy surrounding with
a classically retrograde cult of personality a certain mathematics
professor, neither charismatic nor even personable, named Weed
Atman, who had ambled into celebrity. (205.6)
This is an extremely interesting paragraph, and it's interesting that it
should be skipped over. Though reinforcing Pynchon's sarcastic description
of the College of the Surf kids themselves -- "boys loosening their ties,
even taking off their jackets, girls ... hitching their skirts up as far as
their knees, a thousand students ... drinking milk, eating baloney- and-
white-bread sandwiches, listening to Mike Curb Congregation records on the
radio, talking about ... the new Nixon monument" -- the glimpse of these
"traveling Movement co-ordinators" and their superciliousness, their
commitment to "analysis" and "the real situation", and their disdain for the
"classically retrograde cult of personality" which they identified as
prevailing on the campus, is equally mocking, if not more so. The fact that
these "traveling Movement co-ordinators" went around acting as agents
provocateurs and, implicitly, stirring up trouble, puts them in much the
same league as Brock Vond.
best
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