VLVL Rex Snuvvle

[Toby G Levy]

Jbor wrote:

>What (and where) exactly is the "moral focus that is clearly left
leaning" that you were insisting the other day was the "side" Pynchon is
"on"?

>It is interesting, however, that you should again attempt to skip over
another extremely interesting passage in the text, where Pynchon's
narrator distinguishes between "the government's version of the Vietnam
War" and "the truth", and which explicitly introduces Rex as having come
to know that "truth" (207.19-208.10). I think the references in the text
to the Fourth International, the BLGVN (real or fictitious?) and Ho Chi
Minh might warrant a little more attention. Rex is the only character in
the novel thus far who has what could be called an overt anti-war agenda.

I'm doing my best, man.  If I skip over things, please continue to fill
in the gaps!

Snuvvle was a grad student who in the course of his Southeast Asian
Studies discovered that the government had lied and was lying about the
war in Vietnam. But since he is an academic, his research carries into
more and more obscure details of the history of revolution in Vietnam
until he focuses upon a Pynchonian creation named The Bolshevik Leninist
Group of Vietnam, a group of Trotskyites trained in France and sent to
Vietnam in 1953 and promptly disappeared.  Snuvvle adores this group with
religious fervor, expressing hope for their resurrection like Christians
awaiting the Second Coming. 

You refer my statement that  Pynchon's work contained "a moral focus that
is clearly left leaning if we may broadly interpret "left" as being
sympathetic to the poor and powerless."

Snuvvle is, although a very minor character, clearly sympathetic, in that
he is obsessed with the fate of 500 people who in all likelihood were
brutally murdered by the Viet Cong.  Snuvvle's only act in the novel is
to promote Weed amongst the members of ADHOC so that Weed becomes the
leader of the group.  There is no evidence that this was done for any
personal gain on Snuvvle's part.

Jbor wrote:

>I think you'll find that they are Student Movement people, i.e.
activists within the counterculture who went around from college campus
to college campus to escalate things, to stir up dissent against
university administrations, a bit like those old trade union organizers
we saw earlier.

You could be right.  Are you talking about SDS?  I have not read
Pynchon's buddy Kirkpatrick Sale's book on SDS.  Have you?  But whatever
movement these people represented, Pynchon casts them in a rather moronic
light.

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