VLVL College of the Surf and PR3

[jbor]

Terrance:

> I'm confident I have not misconstrued Sale's critique of the
> Columbia debacle.
> The students there were desperate and defiant, violent, polarized, and
> Sale agrees with the Conservative critics of the events and the tactics.

I haven't said that you've misconstrued Sale, or that Sale is not critical
of some aspects of the student protests there; I'm just saying that I don't
think that Columbia <--> College of the Surf in _Vineland_, and I don't
think you've provided persuasive evidence from the novel to support this
claim. I don't think the novel says anything about the protests at Berkeley
in 1964 or the protests at Columbia in 1968, except that, from Rex's
viewpoint perhaps, there was more to them than there is at College of the
Surf (208). The parallels aren't there, the two institutions are dissimilar
in almost every respect. I think Weed's maths/group theory stuff is
incidental, funny, and an area Pynchon is well-versed in himself, and which
he comes back to often (cf. Poisson distributions in _GR_, the new novel).

Many tertiary institutions name their buildings thematically, and for local
heroes or dignitaries -- that the best the Trasero County people can come up
with are surfers and a Nixon monument is of a piece with the rest of the
satire Pynchon has constructed.

I don't think it's necessary that College of the Surf <--> Columbia for
Pynchon's satirical depiction of the collapse of "the Movement" to work. I
agree with you that Sale describes the splintering of SDS at Columbia, and
that he shows how the "the Movement's" eventual disintegration is
foreshadowed in the events there. But note that the College of the Surf
students are not politically polarized or desperate or defiant or violent,
and that PR3 is the only faction. I don't agree that Pynchon is satirising
the entire '60s Student Movement ("Berkeley-Columbia") in the novel. If that
was his aim, then he has indeed written a parody -- a neo-con revisionist
whitewash -- because he's deliberately left such a lot out in order to
present a negative, and false, impression of the era.

I agree that Pynchon satirises the College of the Surf revolt and PR3. He
demonstrates that anti-War and Civil Rights had slipped off the agenda, and
he shows how, by the last days of "the Movement", both the students and the
radicals were either oblivious or complacent or otherwise ineffectual.

> Pynchon's ironic parody is a scathing satire.

What's it a parody of?

best