VLVL Rex and the BLGVN

[jbor]

otto
> "(...) Rex Snuvvle, a graduate student in the Southeast Asian Studies
> Department, who while being indoctrinated in the governments' version of the
> war in Vietnam had, despite his own best efforts, been at last as unable to
> avoid
> the truth as, once knowing it, to speak it, out of what he easily admitted
> was fear of reprisal.  In his increasingly deeper studies he had become
> obsessed with the
> fate of the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Vietnam (...)."
> 
> This is how it is in my book. How it's in yours?

Yes, that's a correct quotation (apart from the possessive apostrophe, which
should be "government's"). You do omit the rest of the second sentence,
however, which tells us that the BLGVN cadres were sent out prior to 1953
and that they disappeared because their politics didn't agree with Ho Chi
Minh's:

    [...] the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Vietnam, a section of the Fourth
    International that up till 1953 had trained in France and sent to
    Vietnam some 500 Trotskyist cadres, none of whom, being to the left
    of Ho Chi Minh, were ever heard from again. (207.25-29)

In the next sentence the narrator, probably filtering the information
through Rex's point of view, states that they had been "sold out by all
parties, including the Fourth International." (207.33)

Rex is a "graduate student" who has been studying the post-war history of
Southeast Asia (N.B. not "Vietnamese" only): that he's a grad. student tells
us that he's in his mid-twenties at least and that he has been studying in
this field for some time. While he has been "indoctrinated in the
government's version of the war" -- through the media, through the political
rhetoric used by the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations, just like everyone
else -- it's through his studies, which were becoming "increasingly deeper"
at this time, that he has come to know the "truth", a truth which
contradicts the government version. Pynchon has set this part of his
narrative in late 1967 or early 1968, probably the latter: we are told that
Rex is soon heading off to "the land of the May Events", Paris '68 (232.13),
and that he has been corresponding with "a handful of exiles" from the old
BLGVN there (207.30-1).

Hope this helps.

best