Where's the labor section?

[alice wellintown]

>
> I think Pynchon's takes on labor are mixed. Though his story lines are
> solidly founded in history, I do not get the impression he spent much
> time around actual workers. His representation of the Traverse clan in
> Vineland does not resonate strongly of actual working folk. Maybe I'm
> getting that wrong, tying it, as I do, to a lifetime of labor and life
> with hard-working, hard-drinking, hardly-making-a-living people in
> actual, rather than fictional, life. I think Pynchon's labor types are
> idealistic cutouts to offer another shading of the anarchy v.
> bureaucracy tension.

I can't quite follow this argument. You say his **take** on labor is
mixed. This seems to imply that he has a positive and negative view of
labor. Is that it?

You say he uses solid historical story lines, but that his characters
don't behave like real workers.

This may tell us something about his take on labor, but you would need
to connect the ideas for us.

That his characters do not act like real characters is a given. VL is
not Christ in Concrete; Pynchon doesn't make realistic characters that
act and look like "real people."

This may have something to do with his not having spent time with real
working class people, as you suggest, but I doubt this can be applied
to all of his characters.

So, it seems, Pynchon's experiences, with real surfers, real college
students, real police officers, real moms and dads and kids, are not
that important to his creation of characters. More to your argument,
his use of characterization may tell us something about his take on an
issue or a group or type, but his rendering them less than actual or
real doesn't tell us that he has a positive and negative or mixed view
of them. Clearly, Marvy in GR, a cartoon racist who has his balls cut
off, is not given even a mixed view. Blicero is a far more complex
cartoon, since we need to consider Weissmann.

Melville knew a lot of working class sailor types, he spent a lot of
time at sea with working men, in fact his Moby-Dick came into focus on
a ship, but his characters are not like real sailors. Although
Melville lived with "savages" and "cannibals" and "heathens", and
although Ishmael is partly an autobiographical character, he is not
more real than Queequeg is real, both are parodies and allegorical
figures of romance. The notion that Pynchon's cartoonish labor
characters, Frenesi's parents for example, are not like real workers
and are therefore indicative of mixed views, seems a difficult
argument to make. Although I agree that Frenesi's parents are given a
mixed view, it is this mixed view that, paradoxically, renders them
more real.