Pynchon's politics, as exhibited in Vineland

[robinlandseadel at comcast.net]

Weird, as my reading of GR is of a book written from a radical left perspective. I mean, WWII filtered through Dr. Albert Hoffmann's finest? I've never read anything that made me laugh as hard as the series of allerative inedibles that the Gross Suckling Conference cooks up for the future leaders of the new world order, and by extension, the coporate world. Go To TRP's intro to "1984" and it's every bit as impassioned an expression of the Radical Left perspective:

"Orwell thought of himself as a member of the 'dissident left', as distinguished  from the 'offical left', meaning basically the British Labour party, most of which he had come, well before the second world war, to regard as potentially, if not already, fascist. More or less consciously, he found an analogy between British Labour and the Communist Party under Stalin---both, he felt, were movements professing to fight for the working classes against capitalism, but in reality concerned only with establishing and perpetuating their own power. The masses were only there to be used for their idealism, their class resentments, their willingness to work cheap and to be sold out, again and again".

What's expressed in that last sentence is pretty much the point of view that TRP has always been expressing. 
 -------------- Original message ----------------------
From: Dave Monroe <monropolitan at yahoo.com>
> 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) .... . . .