VLVL College of the Surf and PR3

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> >> Meanwhile, back at the text, Rex Snuvvle is described as follows:
> >>
> >> while being indoctrinated into the government's version of
> >> the war in Vietnam, [he] had, despite his own best efforts,
> >> been at last as unable to avoid the truth as, once knowing
> >> it, to speak it, out of what he easily admitted was fear of
> >> reprisal.  (207)
> >>
> >> The point Pynchon is making in _Vineland_ is that, by 1969, there was no
> >> longer a "combined civil rights/anti-war movement". The students and
> >> agitators were busy bickering amongst themselves, smoking dope and playing
> >> dress-ups and, eventually, making bombs and breaking things, and
> >> demonstrating and rioting just for the sake of it. The Civil Rights and
> >> anti-War and free speech causes got lost along the way.
> >
> > Why would P make this point? I don't think this is his point at all.
> 
> Why not? 

Because it's not a point worth making. If this is his point why does he
trace the Turnings and Betrayals we have been talking about into Vietnam
and back into 50's Hollywood and Cold War organized labor? The bickering
and the in-fighting, doesn't begin in the late '60s. There is  poignancy
in the lost Civil Rights cause for sure, but if Pynchon's point is to
tell us his version of what happened by 69 he should get out of the
novel writing business. 

I don't think he's reducing the whole '60s Student Movement, from
> Berkeley to Columbia and beyond, to the farce which is College of the Surf.
> Is that what you're arguing his point is?

No, Im not arguing that at all. The novel doesn't even address the whole
of the 60's student Movement. It's not in the book. We agreed, I think,
that VL doesn't take up the free speech movement or the anti-war
movement or hundreds of other causes and movements that were active at
the time. It's just not in the book. 


> 
> It's a fictional college and a fictional revolt that follow the model of
> many incidences of campus unrest all across the USA, from the 1960
> Greensboro sit-in through to the confrontation at Jackson State in 1970.

Of course it's a fictional setting. But in any Pynchon novel history is
blended in to the fictional, the  Bolshevik Leninists Group. 

> 
> Another example: Rex's back-story is reminiscent of WHORE (World Historians
> Opposed to Racism and Exploitation), who co-sponsored the revolt at Kent
> State in 1970.

OK. 

> 
> Like the characterisation of Sphere in _V._, College of the Surf is a
> composite creation rather than a *specific* parody of Columbia U. However,
> Pynchon's selection of a particular point in time, and thus a particular
> phase in the devolution of "the Movement", is quite deliberate.


Agreed.