Boomer myopia

[David Casseres]

I very much agree.  All of Pynchon's novels are polychronous histories
-- sheets of different times, factual and imagined, overlaid upon one
another, sometimes synchronized with each other and sometimes sprung
and warped against each other.

I'm four years younger than our man, and my internal zeitgeist is an
amalgam of late-50's hipster-wannabe and early-60's antiwar hippie.  I
think his is similar but with a greater emphasis on the 50's, and a
much deeper education in the histories, going back at least to the
Enlightenment, that gave us the wars of our lifetimes.  Taking
Vineland as a what-happened-to-the-hippies novel really does miss the
point; it's what's happening to the Enlightenment as well, and the
sacrifices of World War II, and Christianity.

Oh and speaking of the Zone, here's the last few lines of a song I've
been listening to, by Chris Smither:

And it's all about that graveyard dancing
Some sit still and some still prancing
Some get stuck between them in the Zone
Where there's nothing left to give them cover
They can't even see each other
They just step and stumble on their own
And they're waiting on a train to take them home
They're waiting on a train
I'm waiting on a train
We're all waiting on a train to take us home

On 11/24/06, Monte Davis <monte.davis at verizon.net> wrote:
> > 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 of *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 Utgarthaloki 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.
>
>
>
>