IVIV IV & Playboy article

[alice wellintown]

Dougmillison wrote:
> Whether Pynchon intended the novel as such will remain debatable, but
> Robin's program of finding  TRP's autobiography in there seems viable, after
> re-reading the Playboy article.  Find the plot point parallels!  And maybe
> TRP has in fact responded to his old college pal's earlier article and
> book.  Where the old journo sentimentalizes to the point of laugh-out-loud
> soft-focus '60s hippies nostalgia, imo, the view of the 60s in IV is an
> in-your-face  breath of fresh if nasty air.

Is IV a view of the 60s? Maybe, but P is a conservative, one could
argue, reactionary, satirist and so he longs for what is lost and what
might have been and never really was--sort of like how the wandering
scholars P so admires long for a love and a life that never existed
but in their construction of its corruptions and perversions. IV is
set in 1970 and longs for a period before 1970, that is, the 60s. But
the 60s it longs for, when free love, like courtley love, was more an
ideal than a practice, was more youthful wet dreams and promises than
anything else.

One of the reasons IV is such a heartless failure. We're all yonger
than that now and we've only just read AtD, a mature, deep, complex,
beautiful masterpiece.