Boomer myopia

[Otto]

I cannot remember having read somewhere that somebody wanted to limit
Pynchon to the Sixties. With "Vineland" he has put that period into a
bigger context.

2006/11/20, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net>:
> 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.
>
>
>