VLVL Is it OK to be a misoneist?

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, March 06, 2004 10:03 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL Is it OK to be a misoneist?


> 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)
>

The extended national family, that's America. Turning "youth revolution
against parents" into a "need (...) to stay children forever," an
unacknowledged desire for order is a simple psychological trick. Charles
Manson had a big success with it. He got all the girls he needed just by
telling them to imagine that he was their father.

> They needed some reconditioning. (269)

sounds to me like Scientology.

I don't know why the following guy mistakes Roscoe for Rex, but he too
thinks of _Vineland_ as a weak text:

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were the authors of a series of books
about capitalism and schizophrenia, most notably Anti-Oedipus, published in
1972 with a preface by Michel Foucault about the book's relevance to
fighting contemporary fascism. In a passage that applies to them as well as
it applies to Wilhelm Reich, author of The Mass Psychology of Fascism,
Deleuze & Guattari write, "Reich is at his profoundest as a thinker when he
refuses to accept ignorance or illusion on the part of the masses as an
explanation of fascism, and demands an explanation that will take their
desires into account: no, the masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain
point under a certain set of conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this
perversion of the desire of the masses that needs to be accounted for." Like
Anti-Oedipus and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Vineland is an attempt to
account for the fascist "perversion of the desire of the masses."
http://www.notbored.org/vineland.html

What's interesting to me is the word "desire(s)" in both the quote from the
novel and the Wilhelm Reich-quote.

> (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
>

But who is Frenesi? Does the novel really present her as heroine of the
Movement? Isn't it one important aspect of the novel that there are no real
heroes at all, that heroism is an outdated concept? That this Movement had
no heroes? Any other presentation of the Movement would have been just
another myth. I think it's Pynchon's achievement that he's able to see the
60's without building new myths. Therefor I think that _Vineland_ is a
better, more subtle text than many critics think. Maybe some of this
disappointment comes from the fact that Pynchon hasn't written a glorious
history of the Movement. How should he?

But what is this female character standing for? Isn't Frenesi that America
"Steppenwolf" are singing about, an America that had allowed a group of
villains to send her children to Vietnam:

America where are you now?
Don't you care about your sons and daughters?
Don't you know we need you now
We can't fight alone against the monster

I think that Christina Koning's final conclusion still is right:

"The triumph of the Right under Reagan in the Eighties becomes, in Pynchon's
analysis, only the latest reversal in a series of conflicts reaching back to
the clashes between US government forces and the IWW in the Thirties, or
hostilities between McCarthyites and left-wing liberals in the Forties. If
the alternative society in whatever manifestation New Deal or Age of
Aquarius is revealed as an illusion, the vision which gave rise to it is an
enduringone. Pynchon's book is a celebration of this vision, of the
alternative America, which no administration, however reactionary or
fumbling, has ever managed to suppress."
http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/generalfiction/0,6121,98976,00.html

Berger puts it this way:

"The social upheavals of the 1960s -- centering around rapid changes in
thinking about race, gender relations, sexuality, nationalism and the
American military, the power of corporate technocracy and marketing --
constituted America's central trauma for the New Right. All the Reaganist
themes return to the 60s and attempt in some way to undo the incomplete
changes of that decade. As the feminist historian Rosalind Pollack Petchesky
describes it, the New Right is in large part "a movement to turn back the
tide of the major social movements of the 1960s and 1970s" (450)."
(Petchesky, Rosalind Pollack. "Antiabortion and Antifeminism." Major
Problems in American Women's History. Ed. Mary Beth Norton. Lexington, MA:
D.C. Heath, 1989. 438-452.)
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html

Otto