VLVL College of the Surf and PR3

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> on 20/1/04 1:37 AM, Terrance wrote:
> 
> > The episode at the College of the Surf is set in 1969, but the episodes
> > at Berkeley are sometime earlier, 67-68.
> 
> I agree, but where the narrator notes that the College of the Surf revolt
> was "not much by Berkeley or Columbia standards" (220) it's a reference to
> the protests at Berkeley in 1964 and the protests at Columbia in 1968.
> That's one big reason why I don't think the College of the Surf revolt is
> meant as "a fictionalized parody of Berkeley-Columbia".

But why does the narrator mention Berkeley and Columbia at all? It seems
to me he's got his tongue in his cheek. 
> 
> Sale's book also traces the decline of SDS in 1969-70 -- the in-fighting and
> factions (cf. the "traveling Movement co-ordinators", Rex, Weed, BAAD),
> gratuitous violence (cf. 253.33, the Pisks), disillusionment. I think that's
> the period Pynchon is fictionalising in _Vineland_, i.e. the way things went
> *after* Columbia '68, leading up to the Manhattan explosion on March 6 1970,
> and to the bloodshed at Kent State and Jackson State after that.

But the decline, according to Sale, did not begin after Columbia. The
polarization, the in-fighting, the disillusionment, the gratuitous
violence, the turning to drugs, as you can see from the excerpts I've
provided from Sale's text, did not begin after the events at Columbia.  

> 
> Pynchon shows how "the Movement" -- symbolised in PR3 -- imploded as a
> result of *internal* flaws and squabbling and myopia. The novel shows how
> these things are chronic and terminal even before Brock's interference,
> which, I agree, does help to speed the process along.

Not doubt about it. 

But when we look at what Sale's account of what happened at Columbia and
we compare these with what happens in the episode that begins on page
204 of VL, it is obvious that Pynchon has fictionalized his source
material. Nothing new for TRP. He expects his readers, or at least some
of them, to see that he has fictionalized another text. Malcolm X in GR.
Graves in V. So on.