IVIV, more lost innocence. Is IV a Paradise Lost? p.38

[alice wellintown]

I thank you for an excellent post and I will reply as time permits.

Thanks very much,

Alice Well


> You've previously argued - and I absolutely agree - that Pynchon's
> essays and introductions are a good place to go if we want to try
> to establish his values. The novels may be too slippery to do so, but
> what we find in those essays can be used to support our readings of the
> novels. So let's go to the ending of Pynchon latest extended non-fiction
> text, his introduction to Orwell'a 1984:
>
> "There is a photograph, taken around 1946 in Islington, of Orwell with
> his adopted son, Richard Horatio Blair. The little boy, who would have
> been around two at the time, is beaming, with unguarded delight.
> Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but
> not smugly so - it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered
> something that might be worth even more than anger [...].
> It is the boy's smile, in any case, that we return to, direct and
> radiant, proceeding out of an unhesitating faith that world, at the
> end of the day, is good and that human decency, like parental love,
> can always be taken for granted - a faith so honourable that we can
> almost imagine Orwell, and perhaps even ourselves, for a moment
> anyway, swearing to do whatever must be done to keep it from ever
> being betrayed."
>
> Now, could someone please explain to me what Pynchon is trying to
> sell me here with this unabashedly sentimental ending? Could someone
> please tell me how he is trying to fool me here, and could someone
> parse out the complicated ironies at work here that sucker the naive
> reader into reading this ending literally? This passage seems not only
> relevant to Doc's actions in IV, but also - and perhaps even more
> so - to Webb's actions in AtD. For Webb, his anger remains more
> precious than his kids, and that's one of the real tragedies in AtD.
>
> It can sometimes be hard to reconcile Pynchon the cynicist or Pynchon
> the genius with Pynchon the sentimentalist, but if we want the whole
> package, we have to accept (though not necessarily love) that sentimental
> streak; we have to be fooled by the kid.
>
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