vineland

[Basileios Drolias]

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                    We Await Silent Tristero's Empire
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On Sat, 12 Nov 1994, Paul DiFilippo wrote:

> 
> 
> Dear Folks,
> Like all of you (probably) I read VINELAND the month of its
> appearance.  I haven't gone back to it yet, but at the time
> I jotted down these ten thoughts, which I thought I'd
> broadcast for what they're worth.
> 1)  Thomas Pynchon _is_ Zoyd Wheeler.  Forced to "act insane"
> to earn his living, Zoyd embodies the bind Pynchon's in:
> compelled by audience expectations to "write crazy."  (Wasn't
> the title of the NYT Rushdie review "Still Crazy etc."?)  And,
> like Tyrone Slothrop in GR (who shares Pynchon's ancestors),
> Zoyd gradually disappears from the novel, as Pynchon has
> disappeared from public view.
> 2)  The first name of the character Frenesi Gates should be
> pronounced "free 'n' easy," not "frenn-essi."
> 3)  Frenesi's experiences with the 24fps film collective
> extend and riff on a similar motif in GR, namely the filming
> of Katje Borgesius and the cinema of Germany in the '20's.
> 4)  Vineland begins with a V.
> 5)  The much-cited passage from VINELAND about "God being the 
> ultimate hacker," which has so impressed critics is not a new
> metaphor on Pynchon's part, extending back as it does to LOT 49.
> "For now it was like walking among matrices of a great digital 
> computer, the zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like
> balanced mobiles right and left,
> ahead, thick, maybe endless."
> 6)  The treatment of multinationals (Chipco) and the country
> of Japan (in the character of Takeshi Fumimota) and the
> portrayal of the girl assassin DL Chastain, all indicate
> quite convincingly that Pynchon has read and absorbed cyberpunk,
> specifically (natch) Gibson.
> 7)  _Nothing_ in VINELAND is ever brought to a conclusion.
> Hector Zuniga's stint with Tubal Detox; the monster that
> stomped Japan; the fate of the Thantoids; midair hijackings--
> everything trails off inconclusively, without final explanation.
> In a book concerned with new beginnings--check out the 
> epigram up front--this is fitting.  And the one exception to this 
> deliberate failure to resolve--the climactic ferrying of Brock
> Vond to the underworld--is apt in that he represents an old
> order hopefully now ending.
> 8)  There is only one actual place named Vineland in the US
> (according to my atlas) and it's in New Jersey.  According to
> my old Columbia desk encyclopedia (circa 1950), Vineland, NJ, is 
> "the seat of a large training school for sub-normal children,"
> a fair description of Pynchon's imaginary CA county.  The 
> historical, semi-mythical Vineland, natch, is generally thought
> to have been most likely located in New England, home to 
> P"s ancestors.
> 9)  The funniest throwaway line in the book is "the _Italian
> Wedding Fake Book_ by Deleuze and Guattari."
> 10)  There are only two paths for an artist who has produced
> a gigantic publically acclaimed masterpiece (GR), if he
> wishes to keep on working.  To top himself or to defuse
> expectations by (temporarily) playing an easier game for
> lesser stakes.  To heighten or to simplify, in other
> words.  That Pynchon has chosen the latter course does not
> make him a coward or failure, but merely places him in
> the company of other great artists who have found themselves
> in a similar fix and chosens a similar course:  Springsteen,
> Gaddis and Prince, to name a few.
> 
> --
> Paul Di Filippo/2 Poplar St./Providence, RI 02906/401-751-0139
> If information wants to be free, does freedom want to be info?
> 

I just thought of adding some things that came to my mind when i read
vineland for the second time (some may be completely wrong, some too 
obvious to many):

11) Vineland's time is 1984. Big brother is Reagan (or the tube). 
(Doesn't the phrase `The tube is watching you now' appears somwhere in the
book?). It feels as if the book is a postdiction to Orwell's predictions.

12) It seems to me that it is intensionally written in the form of a soap
opera (hence the simplicity). Everything feels naive and stupid somehow. 
Everything fits with everything else in the most odd manner, and not in
the best possible way. 

13) No physics appears in the book. It's just metaphysics (and UFO's and 
monsters) that are interesting to people of the '80ies.

14)As GR is  book about America in its birth as a superpower, CoL49 about 
a superpower America with something rotten in its kingdom (posssibly) and 
Pynchon's alleged new book is about America in its birth as a nation, 
Vineland is part of the chain by being America as superpower ready to 
collapse.

15) `There are no "if"'s in history' was the first lesson that I learned
from my history teacher. Vineland seems to be about people who haven't
learned that lesson. (Incidentally isn't it J. Wheeler's student Kip
Thorne who has made time travel through wormwholes and the change of history 
popular?)

basil