ATDDTA (3): Control issues, 54-56

[David Morris]

On 2/16/07, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> "Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep - if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching - need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family." (VL, 269)
>
> In Vineland Pynchon more or less give us the straight dope (as it were), and he's pretty explicit in his critique of this wish to stay children forever.

Well Pynchon was a contemporary (maybe just a bit before) this
generation, and I think he has his sympathies along with his
critiques, just as he likes his schemiels and his Whole Sick Crews (at
least I think he likes them).  They aren't heroes, except accidentally
from time to time, but they're marginal status makes the defacto
rebellious of the control of the Bad Guys.  The rebellion on the
campus in VL really is accidental, especially so its leader, and had
no chance of standing against the Powers That Be.  I'd say it's more a
sad fact than a critique.

>In AtD he doesn't explicitly condemn the Chums but leaves it to the
reader to see the irony of the narrator's continued insistence to call
the Chums "the boys", despite the clear loss of innocence they -
against their wishes - experience throughout the novel. After having
witnessed what they do during World War I it takes at least a wilful
act of blindness to remain boys....

Yes.  And I'd say this willfulness is the real sin, and thus more an
explicit critique/condemnation than the kids in VL.

David Morris