Prairie vs. Zoyd as Protagonist of Vineland

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 10, 2010, at 7:45 AM, Dave Williams wrote:

> How Swiftly we forget that Pynchon is an American Romantic.

Well, all the puns appear to be coming from a different place.

As far as "We's" issues are concerned, "We" never forgets that Pynchon  
is an American Romantic. However, most of the folks on this forum  
aren't Sybil.

Whatever Pynchon may or may not be, the author does not dwell o're  
much in the nineteenth century. There may well be a Blakeian aspect,  
an aspect that echos and rhymes with the New England  
Transcendentalists and other 'non-scheduled theologies" but there's  
also an aspect of the Beats and Hippies that rhymes with Blake and his  
drunk and rowdy crowd. By the time we got to San Narcisco the waters  
were already on fire. Pynchon's despair for what was lost may well be  
allied to nineteenth-century impulses, but the content is fairly well  
fixed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. A major concern is  
America as Empire post WWII, a decidedly post-modern subject.