AtD/VL: The Traverse Clan

[Michael Bailey]

Mark Kohut wrote:
> C-mon, y'all...partner up with Laura via a response or three to this interesting
> question, eh? Ishmael Reed's got nothing on Against the Day--or Vineland.
>

I think there are commonsense generalizations which serve as
touchstones from which to build embellishments - boilerplate like what
Pynchon said about Native Americans and everything subsequently to
happen in American history...
someone who departs from the recognized truth like Ayn Rand glorying
in their defeat and displacement is plainly seen to have left the path
of wisdom

as to African-Americans it'd be something like, as a group, as a rule,
this is an oppressed segment.  It doesn't explain everything, it
doesn't completely excuse individual misdeeds, but to forget that in
writing about them is to lose the thread.  For Reed, as a member of
the group, his embellishments come from an insider experience,  are
many and varied and drawn from experience and research driven by
interest born from experience...

For Pynchon, writing as a member of a different group, the brief
portrait in Vineland of the black activists focuses on their
impingement on the lives of rad-libs and how they appeared to that
group, whose viewpoint and perceptions is more integral to Vineland.
Like the treatment of the Holocaust in GR, it only touches on the
story briefly and intermittently; and John Sayles's portrait of the
black activist in his book _Union Dues_ is similarly brief and
similarly positioned -  the author's not claiming in GR, Vineland, or
Union Dues, that there isn't a different back story that isn't being
told, but not really making any attempt to tell it - and why should
they?

so when it comes to "women qua women" - again, not being a member of
that particular subgroup, the best Pynchon or any male author can draw
on is educated, sympathetic guesses.  And research...

The home truth about women in texts written by heterosexual men, the
text that may as well be knotted into samplers, which is trite and
true and folly to depart too far from, is simply that women are
different, and vive la difference...

Since the impingement on the lives of Profane and the men of V. is
much greater in the case of women than the impingement on the life of
Frenesi and Weed of the Black militants, there is more evidence of
educated guessing and embellishment.  He dares to try to write from
women's viewpoint because they are important, nay crucial, to the
story; he dares to attempt some statement of what the difference might
be...

and because he is a young heterosexual male, there are a couple places
where the ladies state a gleeful joy, a reckless abandon, they feel in
loving men (giving readers a chance to withhold sympathy and claim
sexism or something, or to extend sympathy and relate it to their own
feelings of reckless abandon toward their own chosen objects of
affection)



-- 
"Why must I be like that? Why must I chase the cat?" - George Clinton,
Atomic Dog