Question re IV: from epic to everyday

alice wellintown alicewellintown at gmail.com
Wed Aug 31 06:11:36 CDT 2011


Janos,
It always helps us when you provide a page number so that we can read
the excerpt in context. Here, Pynchon slides into the local dialect so
the words "everyday" and "epic" describe a range of sexual desire. The
narrator or character, in what appears to be a typical Pynchonian
paranoid reverie, wonders if the dark forces or dark crews,  who work
for greed and fear, have been there all this time, even at every
counter-revolutionary event, working to reclaim the power of the
people for the forces of greed and fear.  Although a common enough
theme in Pynchon's California trilogy, here the Oedipa-Complex
paranoia that Pynchon works wonders with in CL49 as he drives the
quest narrative with a protagonist who, to use Foucault's term, is "We
Other Victorians," here we get the Van Meter and Zoyd and Oedipa's
husband Mucho and Larry version that is subjected to the satire of
drug induced hippie stupidity and paranoid grand delusions of
surrender.


2011/8/31 János Széky <miksaapja at gmail.com>:
> What I understand here is the emotion but not the exact meaning.
> Please help me with the syntax:
>
> "Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally,
> love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East,
> wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the
> music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to
> everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and
> fear? "
>
> I mean, are both "from epic to everyday" and "for the ancient forces
> of greed and fear" related directly to "reclaiming", or is "from epic
> to everyday" an apposition to "sexual desire"?
>
> Thanks,
> János
>



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