Re: SLPAD 6 - “the class angle”

[Michael Bailey]

I was gonna say, that’s what I think he’s getting at: the great leveling
did exist for enlisted & especially for drafted persons. A librarian could
be in a platoon with a rich kid, a mechanic, & a farmer, even different
“races” in some cases, regardless of “previous condition of servitude”
which was joked about in books & movies iirc…

But the officer class was a different matter, replacing civilian castes
with its own punctilio.

On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 3:23 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> So I went and reread the intro to *Slow Learner* to remember all TRP
> tried to indicate by 'the class angle".
> Yeah, he saw in the Navy what Mailer saw in the WW2 army and put into The
> Naked and The Dead', an
> officer--enlisted class structure with Stormin' Norman getting nuanced
> about levels of power and orders-taking.
>
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2023 at 12:40 AM Michael Bailey <
> michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Indeed. I think it’s unsurprising that the young Pynchon developed a
>> perception in the military of the -  or, let me just say, a sympathy for
>> the working classes.
>>
>> As an intelligent person growing up in the 20th century, he already had
>> exposure to idiocy latent or flamboyantly evident among “adults…charged
>> with heavy-duty responsibilities” but the stark class contrasts in the
>> Navy
>> would be harder to ignore.
>> --
>> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>>
>