VLVL Rex and the BLGVN

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, May 15, 2004 12:51 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL Rex and the BLGVN


> 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 Southeast Asian Studies
> > Departmentcadres 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

Yes, it does, thanks.

I see the difference in our interpretation. I think that the sentence says
that he's been indoctrinated at the SASD, you add indoctrinated by the media
etc. "just like everyone else" -- which isn't said in the novel. The
impression the text gives to me is that SASD-students back then were
especially introctrinated  in the governments' version of the history.

You say that "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." -- that's not what the text says. The
text says that he came to know the truth despite the indoctrination he was
exposed to, and that his "increasingly deeper" studies led him to become
obsessed by the fate of the BLGVN.

I still can't see the Cambodian connection to the BLGVN.

Otto