Why Windust & Maxine?
Joseph Tracy
brook7 at sover.net
Sun Dec 15 21:36:24 CST 2013
On Dec 15, 2013, at 7:43 AM, Fiona Shnapple wrote:
>
> This novel, BE is Pynchon's 1984.
>
> Not trying to confuse matters but some of the major themes about
> family, family values, what Brock calls the un-holy triangle,
> Frenesi's children (her daughter, the Protagonist of the novel, and
> her son) are continued here in BE.
I would say that Vineland was closer to being P's 1984 , and more really of a compare and contrast with both1984 predictions and BraveNew World predictions. Turns out you don't need feelies , regular TV will do. And drugs are hard to control. Some people can be reprogrammed ( Frenesi?) but it's harder than it looks. TV is about as good as it gets if what you want is a nation of Zombies. Brock dreams of becoming the Minister of Truth but the 1984 vision is incompatible with market theories and is canned as he is.
>
> So, Big Brother, Brock and Raygun and the rest are keen to capitalize
> on the family and how it is produced and kept, both productive for Big
> Brother and anti-productive for the family and for life of Proles.
Yes, so they put out variations on Father Knows Best and Cop shows. But market forces are offering too many options and families, communities, are morphing accordingly. Totalitarianism has so much to keep track of and loses a lot of sex appeal and kindly but firm father appeal when gunning down Bishops and nuns and blowing up tree lovers and college students.
>
> See, there is one huge difference in Pynchon's 1984, and that is that
> the Proles are not entirely ignorant. In 1984, the Proles are all
> there is left of hope that one day Big Brother will be overthrown, but
> they are ignorant of their power, and Orwell makes this power
> explicitly sexual, the production of more proles, the fertility of the
> Proles and their family values as opposed to the States.
Well part of the point of 1984 is how hard it is to enforce that ignorance and that the entire function of a totalitarian state revolves around enforcing that ignorance. Brave New World proposes that mindless contentment is better than enforcement and takes less effort, so in this case the state functions like God in a garden where only .1 % taste the fruit of metacognition, and they can just be removed from the Garden.
In essence 1984= fascist totalitarianism BNW= socialist totalitarianism. But I think P is addressing the peculiar blending that leads to a capitalist totalitarianism backed with an international military and a fading democratic facade. In other words the system that actually has emerged since WW2
The core difference is that the success of the psychological totalitarianism of capitalism relies on the degree to which it is internalized as a reasonably free choice among competing products and ideas, lifestyles and affinities. Those choices will by faith always improve in diversity and quality as by evolutionary process even though the choice of say living in a wild place outside the dominant paradigm is no more an option than the perfectly sane choice of a nuclear free technology or demilitarized politics, or even toxin-free food air and water.
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