Watts article

[jbor]

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_watts.html

It's worth pointing out that "Negroes living in better neighbourhoods" come
in for a share of the criticism in the article, as do black social workers.
(Similarly, one of the more interesting aspects of 'The Secret Integration'
is that the Barringtons are middle class; it's not the fact that they have
moved into a white neighbourhood which is the problem, it's the fact that
they have moved into a white *middle class* neighbourhood.) The Watts
article doesn't gloss over the community's problems with alcoholism,
vagrancy and vandalism either. That Pynchon recognises and engages with the
complexities of a situation is one of his great strengths, both as a writer
of fiction and, as in the Watts article, as a journalist (investigating a
recent killing and trial in the context of the Watts riots) and social
observer (commenting on some of the intersections between various social and
cultural phenomena). I don't see a simplistic analogy between race and class
operating in the Watts piece (or in any of Pynchon's work). And, as always,
the article is specific to a particular time and place, and not reducible to
some crude political metaphor or abstruse allegory of reading which was
supposed to have been Pynchon's *real* purpose in writing the essay.

I also think that Pynchon -- contracted in advance to write this piece and
thus knowing full well where it would be published -- had a pretty good
handle on who the actual readers of the article would be, and of the fact
that it was destined to reach a far wider audience than anything he had
written previously. It's fair to say that he wrote the article fully
realising the way it would colour the general public's perception of him, of
his work, and of where his sympathies resided in regard to the Civil Rights
debates of the day.

The most striking passages in the article are those where the second person
("you") is used in a literary way -- not to construct some "imaginary
reader" -- but to enter imaginatively into the "mind" of Watts residents as
they try to navigate their daily confrontations with one another, with their
impoverishment and marginality, and with "the Man". Despite the obstacles
stacked up against them Pynchon takes care to foreground their perseverance
and resilience, and permits them to speak, or think out loud, for
themselves.

The aim of the article is to present an insider perspective, so to speak.
Part of the problem -- as Pynchon identifies it -- is that the general
population (i.e. the readers of the NYT piece, black and white) only ever
view Watts from the outside -- through the lens of the media, from the
freeway, through the window of an aeroplane -- and so they (we) have no
understanding of or empathy with the lived experience of this community.

best

on 24/9/04 9:03 AM, jbor wrote:

> The shifting second person pronoun in the Watts essay preempts its literary
> usage in GR. Pynchon's article aligns most notably with 'The Secret
> Integration', not _Lot 49_, and I'd say it's that story that prompted
> Kirkpatrick Sale to ask Pynchon to write the piece.
> 
> The article exemplifies the fact that the Civil Rights Movement was the one
> cause in the '60s that Pynchon was committed enough to to pull himself away
> from his glozing neuterdom and to get out and do. A lot of readers don't
> like to accept this fact, for whatever reasons, but there it is. It is,
> after all, a piece of investigative journalism, Pynchon's only foray into
> that field. Its purpose is to "journey into the mind[s]" -- positing a sort
> of communal "mind" in the article's title -- of the people of Watts and
> Pynchon has done this by going there and talking to them and then presenting
> their viewpoints and opinions to the reading public, both white and black,
> in the New York Times Magazine. Far from positioning himself or his reader
> as a tourist, his articulation of grammar, narrative structure and
> descriptive language is aimed at getting the reader to empathise with the
> Watts residents (and, momentarily, police, social workers etc), and to show
> these readers some of the complexities of the situation in Watts and remind
> them that the closest they will ever get to this unhappy place is in those
> planes that hang in the air overhead every twenty minutes or so (because, of
> course, this impoverished minority community is directly on the flight path)
> -- and that, perhaps, this is part of the problem. The Simon Rodia and
> Festival of the Arts stuff is likewise an ironic counterpoint, and it
> provides a useful insight into Pynchon's own literary method, and his
> fascination with "waste" and found objects.
> 
> It's a powerful and effective piece of writing; my only criticism is that
> Pynchon sometimes allows literary fanciness too much rein, to the point
> where it almost overwhelms the exposition and critique.