VLVL Rex and the BLGVN

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, May 11, 2004 9:03 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL Rex and the BLGVN


> 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.

Because Pynchon's treatment of ideologies and beliefs is an interesting
thing throughout his novels.

> 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.
>

That's true, as I've said before.

> 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 have the same topics: ideolgies and history.

> that both
> passages refer only to Puritanism and political dynasties in America,

I've never said that the second passage refers to Puritanism. You're making
this up. Wimpe is talking about the Marxian idea of history, Rex about the
imagination the "Puritan Capitalist Faith" has of being "immune to all the
history the rest of have to suffer." Pynchon is deconstructing both.

> 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

You shouldn't misread my posts deliberately.

Otto