Pynchon's politics, as exhibited in Vineland

[Dave Monroe]

>From Takayuki Tatsumi, Full Metal Apache: Transactions
Between Cyberpunk Japan and Avant-Pop America (Durham,
NC: Duke UP, 2006), Ch. 2, "Comparative Metafiction: 
Somewhere between Ideology and Rhetoric," pp. 38-59
...

"We have come to understand that, as Walter Benn
Michaels has implied, the more advanced our
consumer-capitalist, postmodern society becomes, the
more difficult it will be for us to distinguish its
ideology from sexual masochism." (p. 58)

http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1:19982242/

http://www.dukeupress.edu/books.php3?isbn=3774-6

>From Walter Benn Michaels, The Gold Standard and the
Logic of Naturalism (Berkeley: U of Cal P, 1987) ...

"But if [the] masochist's desire to be owned is
perverse, it is nevertheless a perversion made
possible only by the bourgeois identification of the
self as property....   What the amsochist loves is
only the freedom to be a slave....  To put it another
way, the masochist loves what the capitalist loves:
the freedom to buy and sell, the inalienable right to
alienate.  In this respect, the masochist embodies the
purest commitments to laissez-faire." (p. 124, pp.
132-33)

As cited in Tatsumi, p. 210, n. 17 ...

--- Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com> wrote:
 
> Pynchon is always focusing on power dynamics,
> which is why calling him a lefty is misleading.
>  He flirts with anarchy as well.  And his “daisy 
> chain” of S&M is also multivalent.  I don’t think
> he commits to anything.
> He just observes and comments.

Again, "plausible deniability."  But also cf. Samuel
Beckett, How it Is (NY: Grove, 1963 [1961]) ...

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Tired of spam?  Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around 
http://mail.yahoo.com