Literature for the Age of Unease: Reading Pynchon Today

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: jbor at bigpond.com [mailto:jbor at bigpond.com]
> http://www.newpartisan.com/home/literature-for-the-age-of-unease- 
> reading-pynchon-today.html
> 

from the article (which despite being pro-Pynchon and a good read, left me with a couple disagreements):

>The real importance of Pynchon's works today - especially the early Crying of >Lot 49 and the persistently-neglected Vineland and Mason & Dixon - lies not >so much in their undistilled paranoia but in the constant suggestion that >trust on any large scale is not possible in America anymore. 

this is good as far as it goes, but isn't there more to Pynchon?  
Like, trust on any large scale has always been a painstakingly crafted and marketed product purveyed for fun and profit, rather than a natural upwelling of individual feeling.  Hasn't it?  I think Pynchon offers something more than just paranoia, even when he's dealing with paranoia - there is something he trusts (the clearest statement of it I can think of is in Vineland, "Takeshi calls these things giri chits, sorta karmic IOU's.  Takes a lot of speed, gets grandiose, wants to base a world currency system on them, so forth - but if you present one to him, he's got to honor it." p 100; or when Pig Bodine has to back off Paola because of BP's hamburger in V.)
 
>....However, the subjects of Homer's epics are heroes, whereas every one of >Pynchon's protagonists is about as close to a loser as a literary character >can get without being named Leopold Bloom. 

Robert Anton Wilson summarizes Ulysses as a working out of the parable of the Good Samaritan (actually there are scads of references to this theme on the Web, but it was Wilson's description that turned the key for me), so I have never thought of him - with his rich inner life - as a loser.  That description was a surprising throwaway.