Watts article

[jbor]

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

on 28/9/04 9:03 AM, jbor wrote:
 
> I don't believe that Pynchon's purpose in writing the article was to
> increase sales of his novels or to bring his name under wider notice, or
> even to make a quick buck (which might have been the case with the 'Esquire'
> and 'Cavalier' gigs.) I think that's quite a cynical view of why he wrote
> the piece.

To clarify, a number of critics have suggested that Pynchon sent the _Lot
49_ story excerpts to 'Esquire' and 'Cavalier' in order to make money, which
seems a reasonable surmise. John K. Young's recent 'Critique' (44.4, 2003)
essay entitled 'Pynchon in Popular Magazines' touches on this issue:

    Pynchon being Pynchon, we may probably never know why he opted
    for such popular venues following the critical success of _V._
    (And Pynchon's executors being Pynchon's executors, his surviving
    letters to former agent Candida Donadio may not answer that question
    for a long time either.) Following Jules Siegel's recollection that
    Pynchon lacked cash at the time (_Playboy_, March 1977, p. 172), it
    seems reasonable to assume that, simply put, Pynchon sold out. Not
    yet the celebrity (nor MacArthur Foundation recipient) he would become,
    Pynchon presumably turned to popular magazines for the same reason
    Faulkner, Fitzgerald and so many other American writers before him
    had; they paid well, and they carried a certain cultural caché,
    especially for male writers. (391)

I disagree with the notion that either 'Cavalier' or 'Esquire' was as widely
read as the 'NYT Magazine', and I also don't believe that Pynchon's decision
to write the 'Watts' piece was "opportunistic" in a comparable way to his
submission of these two story excerpts.

I accept the possibility that the circulation of the 'Saturday Evening Post'
was greater than that of the 'NYT Magazine' in the mid-'60s. My point was,
however, that the 'Watts' article, a piece of current affairs journalism
which Pynchon contracted to write for the 'NYT Magazine', made clear his
stance on the Civil Rights cause in a far more forceful way than 'The Secret
Integration', a piece of fiction, ever could. Again, from Young's essay:

    The 'Post' sells its readers a particular image of America that
    Pynchon's story aims to subvert. There can be no doubt that Pynchon
    uses the 'Post' to promote his own commercial appeal, or that in
    doing so he implicates himself within the broader circuit of
    commodification that includes all the magazine's contents. In
    publishing this particular story in this particular magazine,
    however, Pynchon also compels his readers there -- many of whom
    were probably encountering his work for the first time -- either
    to misread 'The Secret Integration' altogether or to accept its
    critique of their presumed cultural values in a source that
    ordinarily confirms them. (p. 396)

With the publication 18 months later of his 'Watts' article -- exposition
rather than fiction -- there could be no such misreading of Pynchon's
critique. In other words, because of both the type of text and the
publication context, the fact of Pynchon's personal commitment to the Civil
Rights cause was made clear to a much wider audience after the publication
of the 'Watts' article than it had been previously, and that is something
which he must have been very aware of when as he wrote the article. I don't
see that this is controversial, or a difficult point to comprehend.

best