Pynchon and DeLillo - A Short Discussion

 I wrestle more with Pynchon than DeLillo. That is, although DeLillo's Underworld is as much a slab of a novel as most of Pynchon's work. DeLillo does not have Pynchon's stoner humor (a phrase I picked up from another article, which I noted in a prior post); neither do I. 

I have come to see both have the same interest in history - what our American history has made of us - that interest me. 

Reading Pynchon’s Abundance (Los Angeles Review of Books), however, these two paragraphs struck me as showing a different affinity I share with Pynchon.

This is actually, for my purposes, the conceptual money shot of the whole novel. In classic Pynchonian fashion, this surreal comic expanse actually encodes a deceptive political provocation. In her black-and-white certainties, her essentially eschatological understandings of the world, Frenesi operates on the same code, the same conceptual DNA, as arch squares like Brock Vond. They may breathe different smoke, but, occupying two extremities of the fabled horseshoe, they are closer than their notional allegiances might suggest. Frenesi is attracted not just to Vond but to authority everywhere: she craves it for her own political ends. Some factions within the Left have always been in the game at least in part for the thrill of eventually (and, hopefully, sooner rather than later!) remanding nonbelievers to the Gulag for reeducation.

Of course, if Frenesi’s political avatars have always been active in California, so too have Vond’s. As Pynchon has always known, going back to the (actual) Nazis in The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), hard-line conservatism has long been part and parcel of California’s “abundance,” whether in the form of Proposition 187, the governorship of George Deukmejian, the formation of the anticommunist Minutemen paramilitary, or the so-called “taxpayer revolt” of the 1970s across Orange County and the San Fernando Valley.

For most of my life, I have had a serious distrust of ideology. Blame it on reading Henry David Thoreau, who I read about 50 years ago. Albert Camus' The Rebel reinforced my anti-ideology ideas. A strict adherence to ideology leads to self-righteousness, and from self-righteousness in politics (and art) comes not just the Gulag, but reigns of terror. The self-righteous need their righteousness punctured. Reading about the Desert Fathers, I was impressed how many saints felt themselves to be horrendous sinners.

 What is not so clear-cut to me is what there is in Twelve Bullets, Four Appendices, and Six Exhibits: On Don DeLillo’s “Libra” (Cleveland Review of Books). I am taking as the backstory to the novel. If anything else, it may be that the self-righteously ideological can have no probably dealing in death.

sch 11/6