VLVL Is it OK to be a misoneist?

[jbor]

Meanwhile, back at the text, NB that it's a detached narrator who commends
Brock's insight into the weak-mindedness and immaturity of the "sixties
left":

      Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the
    sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for
    it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents
    of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw
    the deep -- if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes
    touching -- need only to stay children forever, safe inside some
    extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these
    kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and
    cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music,
    breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They
    needed some reconditioning. (269)

(And I believe that Paul did refer to this passage, though most everyone
else has tried to avoid it -- no surprise). No matter how much of a bastard
Brock is, his hunches are right -- Frenesi is the case in point. Pynchon has
orchestrated his text in such a way to compel his readers to face up to some
unhappy and, supposedly, shocking truths -- that an arrogant little upstart
like Brock had the better of the '60s "Youth Movement" all along, and that
the Movement's erstwhile Boadicea is the biggest traitor of them all.

best

on 6/3/04 9:04 AM, jbor wrote:

>> And yet, there's Pynchon's own apparent defence of Luddism -- perhaps the
>> most misoneistic and reactionary of all sensibilities -- in that 1984
>> article:
>> 
>> http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_luddite.html
>> 
>> I suspect there's somewhat more ambivalence evident in Pynchon's writings
>> than some commentators are willing to acknowledge.
>> 
>> Overall, Brock's social diagnoses are quite apt: both this recognition of
>> the inevitability of a government and popular backlash against the '60s
>> "[r]adicals, militants, revolutionaries" (272-3), and, more pointedly, his
>> "genius" in seeing "in the activities of the sixties left not threats to
>> order but unacknowledged desires for it ... etc" (269.5-15: not so
>> surprising, I'd say, that this passage has been avoided like the plague).
> 
> And note also Brock's understanding of how the small percentage of "tough
> cookies" who are "in it for real" and who can't be turned will end up being
> "remanded someplace else" -- these are the extremists, criminals,
> terrorists, as we've seen -- whereas he's counting on "the other 90%" of the
> '60s kids being easy to land (270.21-32), a calculation which is also borne
> out by the rest of the novel.
> 
> best
> 
>> A
>> more productive way of understanding the resilience of political
>> conservatism in recent times might be to open one's eyes to the flaws and
>> failings of the "revolutionists", as Pynchon invites his readers to do in
>> _Vineland_.
>