Boomer myopia

[Carvill John]

Ok, good post. I agree with pretty much all you're saying, but I suppose it 
could be boiled down to: there's a lot more to Pynchon than just 'Oh! Those 
1960s!''. And who could argue with that?

On the other hand he did write Vineland.

Pynchon's work, GR especially, is like the Bible (with better jokes) - 
there's an awful lot in it, and an awful lot of that is often open to an 
awful lot of varying interpretations, that's part of what makes Pynchon 
Pynchon.



>
> > I guess from your tone, Monte, that your strong reaction to
> > this stuff is coloured to some extent by your existing attitude to the
> > 1960s, Vietnam, and of course to the 'boomers'.
>
>I *am* a boomer, born 1949, one who thought Vietnam was a horrible blunder
>-- as did my father (USMC 1941-1945), my mother (USMC 1943-45), and my
>leading-edge-of-the-boom older brother (USMC Vietnam 1968-69, having
>accepted a NROTC scholarship in 1963 that didn't seem like such a bennie by
>1967). So, honestly, I'm not trying to open rhetorical space between
>"Pynchon, writer I like" and "critique of Vietnam."
>
>Nor do I deny that a lot of the marvelous manic energy of GR reflects the
>cultural energies at work in the 1960s -- anti-war energy as well as civil
>rights, sex & drugs & rock 'n roll, and all the rest.
>
>But there's abundant evidence in the early stories and V that *before*
>Vietnam was a central issue, *before* the 1960s acquired their
>self-congratulatory mystique, Pynchon was already culitivating a broader,
>deeper critique af *all* the American promises betrayed and unfulfilled...
>and even broader and deeper, a critique of the hopes placed over the
>centuries in science and technology and Enlightenment and 
>industrailization,
>in communism as well as capitalism and nationalism and imperialism and
>fascism, in Europe and Asia and Argentina as well as in the US. Certainly
>that critique flourishes in M&D and AtD. I'm pretty sure it would have done
>so without either Vietnam or The 1960s As We Know Them.
>
>For me, the heartbreak of the Zone in GR is a lot deeper than Major Marvy
>foreshadowing Gen. Buck Turgidson in "Dr. Strangelove" or LtCol Kilgore in
>"Apocalypse Now," or GE gobbling its way to the Utgarthalokii banquet table
>alongside IG Farben and ICI. The revolution's betrayal of Tchitcherine...
>and Blicero's betrayal of whatever better self Rilke might have made him...
>and what Broderick and Nalline did to young Tyrone... and Slothrop's 
>failure
>to grow up and love fruitfully -- they all draw a lot of blood, too.
>
>Most of all, the Zone (with its outposts in Hiroshima and Katyn, Auschwitz
>and Nanking) was a time and place when -- if ever in history -- people
>should have looked around and said "Enough-- we can't go on like this." 
>Then
>they proceeded to go on like that, developing the A4 into machines that
>could crank out a dozen WWII's in half an hour. And those machines are 
>still
>out there, still telling every little dictator on earth "this is how the 
>Big
>Kids play the game. *That's* the fucking heartbreak.
>
>I agree 110% that Pynchon is a political writer. But I also think his
>politics are the politics of original sin, operating on a moral and
>historical scale at which the USA in the 1960s was a blip: just another
>among many examples of some holy fools and their mindless pleasures, 
>getting
>a glimpse of grace and then fumbling the follow-through.
>
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