ATDDTA (3): Control issues, Chums, They

[Tore Rye Andersen]

From: Joseph T:

>For several reasons I find myself in serious disagreement , as I did  the 
>first time around with the argument that VL was written as  primarily a 
>crtique of the failures of the  left  of the period it  covers though it 
>functions that way very effectively.

It seems to me that you are "in serious disagreement" with an argument which 
hasn't been advanced, at least in this thread. No one said that "VL was 
written as primarily a critique of the failures of the  left  of the period 
it covers." If VL is "primarily" about anything, it is probably about the 
persistent betrayal of the original American Promise; it is about the 
soiling of that "fresh, green breast of the new world" the Dutch sailors see 
towards the end of The Great Gatsby, and it tries to answer that question 
from the end of Lot 49: "how had it ever happened here, with the chances 
once so good for diversity?" (and in M&D, Pynchon will elaborate this 
answer). The answer is a complex one, of course, and the greed of characters 
like Scarsdale Vibe is an important part of it. Another, much smaller, part 
of the answer has to do with those "failures of the left" you talk about, 
but pointing out that VL deals with this problem is hardly the same as 
claiming that it is primarily about this problem. As both David Morris and I 
have pointed out in this post, Pynchon finds a lot to love in characters 
like Zoyd, and it is pretty clear that Pynchon's sympathies lie with Zoyd 
and his ilk, but this doesn't prevent him from discussing some of their 
flaws as well. He hardly blames the left as the main culprit here, but they 
had a part to play in how things turned out, and VL - among many other 
things - deals with this.

>I don't buy that the historic events were importantly less  cataclysmic for 
>the period covered in Vineland. They were'nt for the  Vietnamese, the 
>Salvadorans, The Chileans, or the planet subjected to  corporate 
>"externalization of costs".

>From the perspective of the Vietnamese, the Salvadorans, and the Chileans, 
the decades from the '60es to the '80es were of course cataclysmic beyond 
belief, but I think you would have trouble finding historians who from a 
global perspective would call these wars as cataclysmic or as historically 
decisive as World War I. And I find nothing like this rhetoric in Vineland:

"You have no idea what you're heading into. This world you take to be 'the' 
world will die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will 
belong properly to the history of Hell." (AtD, 554)

o-or:

"The world came to an end in 1914. Like the mindless dead, who don't know 
they're dead, we are as little aware as they of having been in Hell ever 
since that terrible August." (AtD, 1077)

In my book, it doesn't get much more cataclysmic than that.

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