Pynchon's politics, as exhibited in Vineland

[Dave Monroe]

>From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her
Errand into the Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying
of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell (New York: Cambridge
UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...

   "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the
Tristero, which has been looming up all along, comes
dangerously close to losing the teasing
epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far
in the novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad
track ... she remembers things she would have seen 'if
only she had looked' (179) ....

[...]
 
   "The Tristero underground has so far been implied
to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolates' having
'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap,
the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of
American history....  By the end of the novel the
Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a
ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic)
but a real, 'embattled' underground about to come out
of the shadows.  No longer hovering on the edge as a
cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus
far represented is almost revealed as a version of
'the other America' that Michael Harrington described
....  This America is 'the America of poverty,'
'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
'internal exiles.'
   "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
its finale, it coul almost be viewed as a New Deal
novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
149-50)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706

--- Humberto Torofuerte <strongbool at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fair enough...it could be that he sympathizes with
> the "lefties" only because they represent the
> Preterite in this case.

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