Woodstock

[Carvill John]

Bekah sez:"IV is not particularly nostalgic if you weren't 
there because the names and places are not the ones which have 
continued on in our collective media-induced memory (Manson 
excepted). "A very interesting point. IV isn't as saturated with canonical Sixties references as we might expect. Is this just because Pynchon wanted to avoid obviousness and cliches? Or is something more complex going on? One of the things that sort of occurred to me as I read through IV first time, was 'how many details would you have to change for this book to have been set in, say, the early 1990s?', I guess this initially triggered by all the Lebowski associations we'd been fed before we got to read the book. I ended up thinking that IV seems both utterly bound up with its temporal setting, and simultaneously somehow not really 'of its time' at all. If it sounds like I'm hedging my bets that's because I'm still puzzling over it. Now and then, I got to thinking that it seemed less 'Sixties' in feel than the 1960s segments of Vineland. Part of me recoils from this line of thought, but still it persists.This sense of duality - that the book is (obviously) very Sixties, yet also somehow not very Sixties at all, ties in, for me anyhow, with the question of just how stoned Doc really is throughout the narrative.Which both contribute to the sense that IV is nowhere near as simple as it seems on the surface.CheersJ
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