Watts article

[Otto]

> 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 problem is that they are black and that the value of the houses around
owned by white middle class people will shrink because this is what has
happened everywhere in the white suburbs. Hardly an American problem, it has
happened over here everywhere where people from Russia have moved to in
greater number. That's the way to develop a ghetto, produce the environment
for street gangs and mafiotic structures. Those who couldn't afford to move
away even have "changed" the name of the street from "Kennedystrasse" to
"Stalinallee."

The lesson from the Barrington-example is that even when a black wants to
live up the expections and values of the whites he cannot do so because the
white society is "not obligated to tell you what our requirements are."

> 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.
>

The "real" purpose of the article indeed seems to be to give a point of view
that is unknown to the white reader and to remind some black, middle-class
readers from New York or elsewhere what they might have forgotten, that what
had happened to Leonard Deadwyler and his wife could happen to every one of
them anytime and anywhere.

>
> 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
>

Or which they have turned a blind eye to, because the facts & figures where
widely known to the readers of the NYT and elsewhere around the world. I
agree to Davemarc that "it's not as if Pynchon unearthed covered-up
documents or solved a crime." He's just setting the record straight that
indeed "no one" expected the cop to be punished, no matter what the "truth"
in that night might have been, an accident or "cold-blooded murder" as Mrs.
Deadwyler claimed.

I don't see why Pynchon's article is *not* a view of Watts "through the lens
of the media"? The difference between the Watts-reality which is "tough" and
the tv-reality of liberal America that can "afford to ignore" the injustice
remains. It's just an article you've read on a Monday morning.

But I agree to you that with the article he puts himself
on the left side of society.

Otto