VLVL Rex and the BLGVN

[jbor]

Just to tidy up ...

otto
> I've compared Rex's rant to the special conversation between Wimpe and
> Tchitcherine on p. 701.17-36, not to the whole of GR.

> I'd be glad to discuss this under postmodern premises,
> taking GR p. 701 into account too

> But the text of p. 207-8 simply isn't on p. 232.

No-one said it's on the same page. And I don't see how a passage from GR is
more relevant to this discussion than those passages in _Vineland_ which
specifically pertain to Rex. Along with the details of Rex's consumer
fetishism (the beach apartment, the Porsche, the man-bag), the narrative
introduction of Rex on pp. 207-8 and the comparison of his beliefs to
finding Jesus provide an ironic context for Rex's self-presentation as a
hard-line Communist ranting against Christianity and Capitalism on p. 232.

The argument that Rex's rant (set in the late 1960s) is the same as the
conversation between Wimpe and Tchitcherine (set in 1945) in GR, that both
passages refer only to Puritanism and political dynasties in America, and
that they support the notion that Pynchon avoids the media because he's
scared of McCarthyism and witch-hunts, is arrant nonsense. It's double
standards and gibberish like this that give postmodernism a bad name.

best