Boomer myopia

[Monte Davis]

Otto: 
> You think the fourth part of GR should be renamed?

No, I wouldn't change "The Counterforce," but neither do I think it's an
especially 1960's title -- or did you mean the Nixon epigraph?

> Artificially leaving out the sixties context when reading Lot 
> 49, GR and especially Vineland would appear parochial and 
> myopic to me.

I certainly didn't mean "leave out the context." What I did mean, and
probably said badly, is:

What stays with me from Lot 49 is less the "stage set" detail and caricature
of mid-1960s California than the *continuities* Oedipa finds beneath and
behind it to a skein of historical threads, to all the lives lived outside
the frame of Kinneret-Among-the-Pines.

What stays with me from GR is less the Kute Korrespondences to the 1967-1972
America of Richard M. Zhlubb than how much of that was already *implicit* by
the summer of 1945, and in turn how much of 1945 was not really Year Zero,
but the working out of developments decades and centuries older.

What stays with me from Vineland is less its particular 1980s look at some
1960s documentary-making radicals than *all* the changes it rings on failed
or half-forgotten "counterforces": cranky independent loggers in the deep
woods, union organizers in 1940s Hollywood, Oriental monasteries cultivating
secret martial arts, etc. I just had a vivid flash memory of "La Guerre est
Finie," the 1966 Resnais film about Spanish Communist organizers carrying on
-- half idealistically, half mechanically -- a generation after Franco's
victory.

And another flash -- the ending of "Heimat", with the living and the dead
chatting amiably as history goes on in the festival outside. To me that's
*very* Pynchonian, reminiscent of the party at the end of Vineland, or the
shades gathering in the Philadelphia house as Revd. Cherrycoke's story winds
down. 

I just think Pynchon has always been after much bigger game than is
suggested by the reflexive, unreflective linkage to the 1960s.