Watts article

[jbor]

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

Pedantry and provocation aside, the point remains that, as an example both
of news journalism and public activism, the Watts article is quite unique in
Pynchon's oeuvre.

What the article announced to the world in no uncertain terms in 1966 was
Pynchon's personal commitment to the Civil Rights cause -- not as a subset
of or metaphor for anti-War or anti-capitalist agitprop, but the Civil
Rights cause in its own right. Not before and not since has he written
anything as provocative or as current for the media. In fact, it's the one
unambiguous political statement he has made publicly on an issue of the day.
It also illustrates the fact that since 1966 Pynchon has enjoyed an open
invitation to voice his opinion in the mainstream press on any political
issue he feels as strongly about as he did Civil Rights in 1966; he hasn't.

Btw, the photos of the Watts Tower &c were great. Thanks for posting them.

best

on 25/9/04 11:20 AM, jbor wrote:

> I'm a little more honest in recognising that the structure and discursive
> features of a text, and the text's "meaning/s", are always related to the
> author's purpose in composing the text. Considering the purpose and effect
> of a piece of writing is more interesting to me than exclusively reader
> response-type analysis, and my notes on the article below were not framed as
> a direct response to isread's posts. I glanced at those posts, thought I
> understood the intended arguments, disagreed with some of them, but am now
> told that I didn't understand them and that something else was intended
> (which, when explained, still sounds exactly the same as the argument I do
> disagree with. Whatever.)
> 
> As to "investigative journalism", the article starts off with a description
> of the shooting of Leonard Deadwyler, summarises some of the witness
> testimony and delineates the court findings. It's journalistic, and it
> investigates a recent event/crime. Pynchon certainly editorialises and
> extrapolates from that opening gambit, which is appropriate to the
> publication context and to his status as an author of fiction. It's not
> ethnography or anthropology, however, both of which as a rule entail
> intensive longtitudinal research, though there are of course general
> comparisons to be made between journalism and sociology.
> 
> I'm not precious about the adjective "investigative"; I don't see that the
> article has much in common with the Tom Wolfe or "faction" stuff. It's
> definitely journalistic. It investigates a specific incident and relevant
> participant perspectives. I've yet to see a more apt label provided.
> 

>> 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.
>> 

>>> 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.
>> 
>> 
>