Vineland and the Death of the 60s

[gary webb]

That is interesting, the is no doubt that the advent of Nuclear Holocaust
hangs over the Post-War World like some sort of death shroud... and Pynchon
gives us its black history in Gravity's Rainbow... I am always drawn to the
chapter on Leni and Franz Polker, Leni the German radical,
*Spartakusbund, *then
there Franz, a cowardly Chemical Engineer, Pynchon writing about the Weimar
Republic, and failed revolution, and his depiction of how Weissman uses
Franz's family, and the coming of the Rockets, and depictions of Weissman
later in the novel, how he has evolved into some primeval teutonic entity...

On Fri, Jul 3, 2015 at 2:59 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Nice personal reflections...all part of Pynchon's widesspeak "
>  "of his time and for all time" as Jonson said of Shakespeare and as Monte
> as good as riffs.
>
> My remark on film in VINELAND is that I see it as a symbol of 60's failure
> in the 70s
> To film not to live the change required.
>
> I can't forget, as Inherent Vice puts in our face, that the 60s had the
> hope that
> Didn't survive them.
>
> In some ways I see GR as a 50's novel; TRP points to the postwar fifties
> in it from within its  ww2 years. 50's, early 60's when
> The bomb hung over all of us. ( almost literally in October 1962)
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> > On Jul 3, 2015, at 12:15 AM, gary webb <gwebb8686 at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > I've sort of been stuck on what has been so called Pynchon's California
> novels... in particular I've been re-reading Vineland... the whole Frenesi,
> 24fps, Brock Vond, death of Weed Atman, and the collapse of PR3... Pynchon
> is writing about a sort of failed revolution or maybe not even revolution,
> and it is interesting that he is using the medium of film to document it
> all, to be followed circa 1984 with the ubiquitous Tube... I didn't really
> give the death of Weed Atman much thought in my first reading of the novel,
> but it is really pretty strong writing, after reading Bleeding Edge and
> Inherent Vice... Gravity's Rainbow, even though it is set in WWII, still
> reads like someone coming to grips with the fallout of what was going on
> during the 1960s, the is a sense of Paradise Lost about the whole book...
> Vineland is written by someone who never really forgot the promise that was
> floated so liberally, someone who had come out of hiding, to tell us where
> we've been and why, even though I think Pynchon was more or less
> acclimating himself, married and child, settled down for all practical
> purposes, but I still plugged into that moment, maybe a little more
> cynical, older, wiser, etc. This is just my interpretation... Gravity's
> Rainbow is a big novel, and there are many threads of meaning... but
> somehow in my mind, Gravity's Rainbow and Vineland have some sort of
> strange link, not necessarily in content or publication chronology, but
> maybe one is an Inferno of sorts and the other is a sort of Paradise, where
> in Vineland one gets a sense that the demons that plagued Pynchon earlier
> in his career, had somehow been exorcised and reconciled with, during a 17
> year silence...
>
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