Who Ya Gonna Call...

[David L. Pelovitz]

Jan writes:
 
> Anyway, my own tuppence worth on TP's attitude towards the Other Side is 
> that:
> i) he's had a long, hard and intimate look at some of the older esoteric 
> maps, eg the Golden Dawn Tarot system, and the Pyndustry has never properly 
> addressed this;
> ii) the GR seance scenes are, at one level, about Their belief that they can 
> routinize, banalize and control everything - and about whether there may be 
> limits to Their control;
> iii) Ditto Pirate's employment as Fantasy Relief for People Who Have 
> Important Work To Do.  (Obviously, since he may well be the central 
> consciousness of GR, Pirate's role is far more complex than this.);
> iv) the Vineland Thanatoids can be read as simply a comment on Tubed-out 
> America.  However, with Weed Atman in particular, we find ourselves floating 
> in a peculiarly Tibetan deadscape.
> 

It seems significantly more complex than that in Vineland.
Frenesi imagines the beautiful patterns of the ones and zeros
and life and death.  But death is mitigated throughout the novel
to destroy the notion that it obeys a one/zero logic.  Brock
fantasizes sexual encounters in which each procreationbrings him
a little closer to death.  The thatnatoids are certainly representative
of the mitigation of death (as television represents a mitigation of life).
Telvision, through infinite repetition, also compromises death's power.
The Kunoichi Puncutron machine adjusts karma so that it does not
apply over lifetimes, but within one lifetime instead - making
death irrelevant.  

Death is, as Jan rightly suggests about the seances in GR,
meant to be under routine government control, while simultaneously
serving as a controlling device.  But it does not behave as
the government would have it, as evidence by Zoyd's conversation
with Wendell Maas about LSD.

" 'Remember how the acid was? Remember the windowpane, down in
  Laguna that time?  God, I knew then, I knew...'
   They had a look. 'Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to
  die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to
  control a population that knows it'll never die?' "

Life and Death are both revealed as frames of reference
that the characters use to structure their worlds.  But
like all the frames of reference in TRP's works (like
Pointsman's Cause-and-effect universe, or Profane's
life-without-learning) they have limits.  They have
rules that may apply within the frames, but there is
always a larger frame in which the rules are different.

I think that Pynchon often uses death to remind the reader
that even something as absolute as we believe death to be
cannot be truly absolute in a probabilistic universe.

David Pelovitz - PELOVTZD at Acfcluster.nyu.edu