C of L 49: "That's how it is..most of the time."

[Campbel Morgan]

On Tue, Jul 14, 2009 at 2:07 PM, Robin Landseadel <
robinlandseadel at comcast.net> wrote:

>
> The dispossesed/loser/schlemiel/49.9%er's are affectionately noted in all
> the texts as the nominal 'good guys' of the game, whilst the farther up the
> food chain ya go, the eviler it gets. There's system hierarchy going on
> here, relative degrees of bad karma & good. But the anarchists don't get the
> thorough working over of the Brock Vonds, the Dr. Hilarius [es], the
> Bliceros. Beyond all those singularities there are the nameless forces of
> 'THEM', even further past that are some really scary natural laws. Everybody
> that passes through Pynchonia gets the standard satirical treatment—TRP
> really ain't all that interested in 'normal' folks anyway.
>


Robin, your reading of the satires seems to imply that the author is a
post-modern American Dickens. Is that right? But do the characters matter
all that much? Do the themes, such as the dispossesed and the nameless
Them(s) matter in these works? While the author admires Orwell, he doesn't
write satires like Orwell's satires. He thinks far too much of his own
aethetics to waste his time with Big Brother, farm animals,  and political
satire. Besides, what the audience wants to read is modern and postmodern
satire and not some worn out Victorian character driven plot. Pynchon is a
cartoonist. His characters are not targets and they are not Victorian real.
And, of course he's interested in normal folk; he's a novelist not an epic
poet, but the folk he's interested in are not in his books.
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