re VLVL Pynchon's eye for detail

[Otto]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
Cc: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Saturday, September 04, 2004 2:07 AM
Subject: Re: re VLVL Pynchon's eye for detail
>
>
> pynchonoid wrote:
> >
> > To be way more accurate, the novel "sets out" -- i.e.,
> > starting in the very first line of the novel  -- to
> > compare Reagan's 1980s America to George Orwell's
> > _1984_. P gives the '60s counterculture rebels their
> > due, but that comes later, clearly a secondary
> > interest for the author:
> >
> > "Later than usual one summer morning in 1984 [...]"
>
> Well, as I said, the critique of the reagan-bush era is obvious from the
> get-go. But reagan-bush is not the target of P's satire. Again, I find
> it odd that readers will focus on an allusion (in this example, and
> allusion to Orwell's 1984) and ignore the what is clearly not a
> secondary interest of the author (in this example, Zoyd Wheeler, his
> family,  friends, & associates) and  the characters, plot ... the
> elements of fiction. What's odd about this tendency to ignore the
> stories while calling attention to obscure allusions and the like is
> that this list purports to be a discussion of Pynchon's works. There is
> little, if any real discussion of the works themselves here. The eye for
> the details obscure and cryptic is the head of the beholder.
>

But it's not *just* "an allusion to Orwell's 1984"; it's at the opening of
the novel, and from a literary point of view that's quite a prominent place
for an allusion. From this place it expands over the whole novel.
Furthermore the allusion isn't "obscure" at all after finishing the novel
but absolutely clear: this is what will happen to your country if you sleep
too long, allow mafiotic structures to persist, let the fascists blackmail
whoever they want, let the government and its agents get away with every
crime.

The "betrayals" of "the left" (as if there ever has been such a thing like a
united left in the US) you and Rob want to make the subject of the novel
only make sense in a police-state, not in a liberal democracy. But that's
what the country in which this (shitty?) novel has been written always
asserted to be. If "reagan-bush is not the target of P's satire" why does
the novel open with it? What is the bigger danger to democracy, smoking dope
and sleeping too long or producing faked evidence, putting innocent people
in detention camps and let them disappear? I think that "Vineland" gives a
clear answer to this. If Zoyd is "Pynchon's stereotype of a zany middle-aged
hippie" as Rob correctly says than crazy Hector and fascist Brock Vond are
his stereotypes of US-cops, right? Very comforting.

But thank god all this is only interpretation. Five years on this list have
turned me into a Nietzschean. I disagree that there is only "little, if any
real discussion of the works themselves here" as long es every other opinion
as the one expressed by the alphas on this list is immediately ridiculed.
Not everybody has the nerve to take this for years. The unwillingness to
discuss has been sufficiently expressed in the discussion of the
"1984"-foreword where obvious references to actual US-politics simply
were declared as non-existing.

Otto