Watts article

[pynchonoid]

This is of course quite different from the argument
offered  in the earlier post, where jbor suggested
that Pynchon, in the NY Times Magazine, finally had a
chance to address a big audience compared to his
earlier publications.  In fact, he probably was
reaching fewer people in the NY Times Magazine than he
had previously with his publication in Saturday
Evening Post.

Thus, Pynchon's story, "The Secret Integration", and
its treatment of US race relations, published in
Saturday Evening Post would have had a wider impact --
and certainly would have reached a broader
cross-section of the US reading public -- than the
Watts essay in the NY Times Magazine, even as the NY
Times Magazine may have reached a more elite,
Establishment audience.

In fact, the Saturday Evening Post was able to bring
stories of social problems into the national
conversation in a way that elite publications like the
NY Times could not.  For example, Saturday Evening
Post's publication, in 1941, of an article about the
then-new organization, Alcoholics Anonymous, is
credited with raising that group out of obscurity and
helping it become a mass, nationwide phenonemon --
leading to a tripling of membership within a few
months after the publication; it's the watershed event
for AA's, described as such in every history of the
organization.

So the notion that the New York Times Magazine
represented Pynchon's first shot at influencing
"general public's attitudes  towards contemporary
political and social issues" is an exaggeration
(based, probably, on a poor understanding of the US
media environment in the 1960s), too. 

In the years since, Pynchon's novels (and collected
stories in Slow Learner) -- with their unmistakable
anti-racist, anti-fascist, pro-environmental politics
-- have had a far wider impact, since they continue to
be published and sell as what book publishers call
"perennial backlist bestsellers", while the Watts
essay is, necessarily (since it hasn't been
republished by Pynchon and remains available only to
specialists willing to seek it out in the NY Times
archives and online) little read. 

jbor:
> 
> It's not a simple-minded judgement about the
> comparative worth of different
> texts to point out that the potential "galvanising"
> effect of the 'Watts'
> article in the NYT Magazine in 1966 on the general
> public's attitudes
> towards contemporary political and social issues is
> far in excess of that of
> a comic story excerpt published in Esquire or
> Cavalier, or of a 760-page
> novel about WWII. No reasonable person would
> seriously contend otherwise.
> 
> 

=====
http://pynchonoid.org
"everything connects"


		
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