VLVL "closed ideological minds" (232)

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sunday, May 09, 2004 1:49 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL "closed ideological minds" (232)


> >>> "You're up against the True Faith here, some heavy dudes, talking
> >>>crusades,
> >>> retribution, closed ideological minds passing on the Christian
> > Capitalist
> >>> Faith intact, mentor to protégé, generation to generation, living
inside
> >>> their power, convinced they're immune to all the history the rest of
us
> > >> have to suffer. [...]" (232)
>
> >> I don't think that Rex is ranting against WASPs, the Pilgrim Fathers or
> >> America specifically, or singling them out. He's a Communist, so he
> >> repudiates religion along with capitalism. He is making a historical
> >> connection between Christianity, Capitalism and political control,
> >> certainly, and Protestantism is one branch of Christianity, but I think
his
> >> intolerance and dogmatism is wider-reaching than that.
> >>
> >> Ironically, with Rex, you're also up against a "closed ideological
mind",
> >> and he ends up murdering Weed because his own "True Faith" is so
unyielding.
> >> The exact same criticisms Rex is making about Western capitalist states
> >> could be levelled equally (if not more so) at Socialist states and
ideology.
> >> The murderous dictatorships in South-East Asia (Ho Chi Minh's, the
Khmer
> >> Rouge) referred to or alluded to in connection with Rex's quest are a
part
> >> of the novel's context which cannot be ignored.
> >>
>
> > Rex may be a Communist of some theoretical stripe
>
> Obviously he is. He rants against the "Christian Capitalist Faith" (232),
> and the narrator tells us that he "was heading for the land of the May
> Events" (232).

Ranting against the "Christian Capitalist Faith" doesn't require a communist
mind.

> When he is introduced into the narrative by Pynchon we are
> told that he had become "obsessed with the fate of the Bolshevik Leninist
> Group of Vietnam" which he believed stood for the "only authentic
Vietnamese
> revolution so far but had been sold out by all parties, including the
Fourth
> International". Thus, he's to the "left" of Ho Chi Minh, which puts him in
> the same league as Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge.

If he's left of the Left he isn't necessarily fond of Pol Pot. I wonder
where you draw this conclusion from. Definitely not from the novel.

> In the novel his quest is
> deliberately given an ironic religious spin by Pynchon -- to him, the
BLGVN
> is a "romantic lost tribe with a failed cause, likely to remain unfound in
> earthly form but perhaps available in the way Jesus was to those who
'found'
> him" (207-8). His version of a "True Faith" leads to him murdering Weed;
in
> historical terms this sort of "closed ideological mind" leads directly to
> the Killing Fields of Cambodia.
>

This is hocuspocus, there's no word of Pol Pot or the killing fields in the
novel; you are merely constructing this. Rex indeed kills Weed because of
his own closed ideological mind, because he thinks a traitor should be
punished. Rex is a sad case.

When Pynchon equates communism to Christianity he does so because both
"isms" indeed can be compared to each other.

Otto