TRTR: Racking my brain over The Rackignitons....

[Richard Ryan]

A compelling and bothersome question Mark.  In the words of Pete Townsend:
"Sickness will surely take the mind where minds can't usually go."

It's not completely correct to call The Recognitions a-political, but it's
politics (at least as far as I've read in it) are nowhere as overt as they
are in Pynchon's novels.

On Tue, Jun 21, 2011 at 12:02 PM, Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>wrote:

> On 6/21/2011 10:51 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> Where do some thoughts come from,  I ask myself, in ways that won't much
>> interest you plisters?
>>
>> But, last evening I was ill, chills and fever and waking up often and once
>> when
>> I did I had this thought:
>> Do you know what isn't in The Recogntions, given its time frame?
>>
>> McCarthyism.
>> Pervades TRP; compare and contrast.
>>
>>  The Recognitions took place in the late forties to early to middle 50s,
> which was certainly the McCarthy era.
>
> However the milieu of R was pretty much intellectual and cultural allusion,
> almost to the point of exhaustion. Not much room for a low brow like
> McCarthy.
>
> McCarthy played the ignoramus and appealed to the ill informed.  To the
> extent there ever was a Communist threat McCarthy was totally ineffective in
> thwarting it. His lists were a hoax. He was pure demagogue.  Nixon at least
> got Hiss.
>
> None of this is to imply that McCarthyism wasn't a very sinister force of
> the era. Just a different type of sinister from the one Gaddis was
> interested in.
>
> I've dashed this off without much thought and am probably overlooking
> something but what the heck.
>
> P
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-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
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