Show Don't Tell: Who is Brock Vond?

[R. Fiero]

The normal interpretation of “The success of the "new left" 
later in the '6o's was to be limited by the failure of college 
kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically” is 
that the college kid elitists were irrelevant in their little 
revolutionary dramas.  On the contrary, the workers viewed 
themselves as stakeholders in the status quo and didn’t notice 
that their children and coworkers were being killed or fucked 
over in ‘Nam and that they supplied virtually endless 
quantities of meat for the failed enterprise.  A significant 
amount of analysis and education would have been necessary for 
the workers to notice their exploitation. Jbor would have us 
believe that the Movement folks of Vineland are themselves 
coddled elitists. Contrary to a certain characterization, 
Ditzah is an explosive badass living anonymously in the Valley 
who works a regular job and incidentally thrives as a 
wiretapped source of disinformation.

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."

Indeed, the true revolutionaries are the businessmen of the 
last several centuries who invented financial instruments 
making possible large concentrations of capital and the 
institution of double-entry bookkeeping for corporate C3I. We 
enjoy longer and better life spans and much more stuff 
especially if one is born White into a rich family.  No 
ambivalence here, workers prefer the status quo to the 
cheapening of their labor and the regulation of that labor down 
to the nanosecond. It’s odd that one would characterize humans 
attempting to hang on to their humanity as being 
“reactionary.”  Please reread the essay.

Showing and telling. The detached narrator that spills the 
fraudulent thoughts of both Vond and Zoyd on pages 272 and 299 
isn’t so much detached as it is one or more unnamed character 
narrators.  Both narrations are equally flawed but contain 
certain naïve plausibilities. A scorpion? Really! This is 
showing rather than telling in my opinion although it’s not 
quite clear what the Zoyd narration is showing.

We don’t have to go far to find some clues as to what Mr. 
Pynchon may actually think:
“What is clear from his letters and articles at the time he was 
working on 1984 is Orwell's despair over the postwar state of 
"socialism." What in Keir Hardie's time had been an honourable 
struggle against the incontrovertibly criminal behaviour of 
capitalism toward those whom it used for profit had become, by 
Orwell's time, shamefully institutional, bought and sold, in 
too many instances concerned only with maintaining itself in power.”
For a very nice exposition of Keir Hardie's life please see
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/PRhardie.htm