V-2nd Dopplegangers

[Mark Kohut]

 " for all ages", as Johnson said of Shakespeare.......

The best writing is THAT...even less-than-best can speak to thematic 
patterns...........

America had no troops in Vietnam until 1963............as TRP hisself said in 
the letter,
'advisors' wanted to force narrowing values on the Vietnamese.................

as has been done in so many times and places.........................



----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, August 18, 2010 4:41:28 PM
Subject: Re: V-2nd Dopplegangers

Yes, thanks for reminding us about that letter; we did read and
discuss it here some time ago. I still don't read a clear commentary
on the War in Vietnam in V., although some P=Listers had a go at that.
In the sewer scene with Benny and the congregation of Rats , for
example, we are reminded of the the Small Rain story, as Laura noted,
and of the american colonial wars from 1900 perhaps...European Heart
of Darkness...but there is nothing there, other than what some readers
who served in Vietnam may read into it, that makes the scene a comment
on that particular conflict. My son, in Afghanistan, who recently
read, The Things They Carried, a book I begged him to read before he
enlisted in the army, sez the book reminds him of right now. of
course, he is right, but he's also wrong if he attributes that reading
to the author.

Another controversial Pychon statement, another letter I read, talks
of this mater-slave relationship; how those who are colonized and
those who do the colonizing are bound together in ironic forces.



On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 2:51 PM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> So, alice, you'd see the historic chapters as the lead up the second fall, a 
>time when people freely chose to turn themselves and others into objects? And 
>the present (1956) chapters as after the fall, no more free choice because 
>people are objects?
>
> That's interesting.
>
> In historic terms, that'd seem like the lead up to the world wars and the 
>aftermath, except that Pynchon was also using this as commentary on the Vietnam 
>war. David Seed reprinted a letter from Pynchon wherein Pynchon talks V. and 
>describes an ongoing long term conflict wherein Western linear-ism is stomping 
>out "Eastern" holistic-ism (not really Eastern since he was including Africans 
>and Aztec). Well, crap, I don't have that letter with me and I'm not getting it 
>right, but maybe you get the point or can look it up instead of trusting me to 
>dumb down a great letter which is especially interesting for V. chapter 9.
>
> But to apply the "lead-up-to-fall" and "after-the-fall" stencil back to my 
>character/scene comparisons, Bongo-Shaftsbury chose to turn himself into an 
>automan, but Fergus Mixolydian is hooked on tv, an extension of the machine.
>
> And Yusef desired to turning people into tattered cloths and dead flesh, but Da 
>Cohno is locked in fetish, an extension of a weapon.
>
> Eh?
>
> Any other twins running through V.?
>