Vineland criticism

[Otto]

Indeed, it's a quite good  essay.

"Vineland" is fun and a very good novel and I have the suspicion that
many people who don't like it discard it because they disagree with
the politics displayed in it and therefor declare that Pynchon is
non-political.

--------------------------------------------------
Pynchon clearly believed that, just because the year 1984 didn't bring
actual "telescreens" into every home in the country, this didn't mean
that Reaganism wasn't an American form of fascism. The year 1984 was
in fact the perfect occasion to ask what Pynchon calls "the perennial
question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist
twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupified years
ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions
of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows," that is, the
old question that brings forth "the names -- some shouted, some
accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of
contention, stomach distress, and insomnia -- Hitler, Roosevelt,
Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection
of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated
above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below, diminished to
the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper,
again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly
fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over,
because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath."
---------------------------------------------------

2006/9/1, John Carvill <JCarvill at algsoftware.com>:
> Couple more - if you haven't already got them:
>
>
> One of the best things I've read about Vineland:
>
> 1. Raptor, Rapist, Rapture:
> The Dark Joys of Social Control in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
>
> http://www.notbored.org/vineland.html
>
> "Pynchon clearly believed that, just because the year 1984 didn't bring
> actual 'telescreens' into every home in the country, this didn't mean
> that Reaganism wasn't an American form of fascism."
>
>
> 2. Babies of Wackiness
> A Readers' Guide to Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
>
> http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/
>
> Particularly the intro:
>
> http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/intro.htm
>
> Makes the crucial point (sometimes overlooked even on the p-list) that
> "People read Thomas Pynchon because he's fun".
>
>
> Cheers
> JC
>