P defends V. ...

[alice wellintown]

On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 1:13 AM, Michael Bailey
<michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 29, 2010 at 4:10 PM, alice wellintown
> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> As far as class goes, I've no idea what your talking about. As far as
>> knowledge of literature, you can't even get into one of mine. You need
>> quite a few pre-recs before you can even apply.
>>
>
> is that not just a little disingenuous?
> When you get into explicating Vineland as about work, for instance.
> Is it possible to talk about the problems associated with work without
> considering the notion of "Class"?

Of course not. That SL Introduction that has casused so much
confusion, yet again, mentions that Edmund Wilson's _To The Finland
Station_, and I posted, what I thought might even prove a useful
Introduction, recently written by an author who writes with extra
clean prose (L. Menand), unlike our Man in Manhattan, to that
influential work. And, I noted that in that muddled SL Introduction,
our Man does hint that his obsession with race (a complex American
habit), evident in TSI and in GR has been tempered by his realization
that race is not as significant as Class.  This kind of thinking is
clearly on display in the post-GR works.


>
> I think class is an important consideration in reading.  I'm by no
> means a Marxist (more of a Proudhonist, if anything - at least when
> his social experiment failed, it didn't involve gulags and
> thoughtcrime and massacres, oh my, gruesome deaths for hundreds of
> millions of people like ol' frickin' Marx, a-and some of Proudhon's
> ideas DID and DO work, co-ops, that is), (or maybe a Prudhommist,
> http://www.chefpaul.com/site.php)
>
> ...but it's simply not as rich an experience to read, well, anything,
> without some of the critical insights that class-consciousness
> provides, is it?

That depends on who is doing the reading and why. I teach poor, and
working class poor college kids and high school kids and class is
something most of them are quite uncomfortable with so it works for
me; I'm all about shoving people off thier wooden horses, out of their
hiding places, into the sewers they are spilling down hill, over the
rainbow. I still contend that Marxist criticism is very useful for
students of American Literature. Not that I toss out other approaches,
though, as I said in a previous post, a fine point, even in say, a
genre reading of P, like the difference between a MS, Magic Realism,
Anatomy, Meta-Historical Romance, non-corrective satire....American
Romance, is worth looking into.


>
> You take the Preamble to the Constitution of the IWW, for instance:
> "the working classes and the employing classes have nothing in
> common."
>
> How true is this in any given situation?  _Vineland_ , while rich with
> IWW references, humanizes the situation to the extent of showing,
> maybe, what other considerations there are to, umm, consider...

Right.  American Labor, as I never tire of saying, was always bread
and butter, not revolutionary. Anarchy, and there are some swell
critical articles on Anarchy & Pynchon, one in that Oaklahoma Law
Review, is very important to Pynchon, obviously. And it is not
Conrad's anarchist, but...sorry....Henry Adams we turn to when we want
to understand how anrchy functions in P.


> So don't be too Coy to admit class to the class of all classes
> classifying Vineland...eh, wot?
>
>
> "all power to the Soviets!"  (Indonesia for the Indonesians!)
>