Dead Again?

[LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu]

Aaron Yeater writes:
"i've been rereading vineland, and noticing the status of death
therein.  some characters are 'unkillable,' like Vond, the
Roadrunner, eluding death confidently.  others, from Takeshi on down,
are in various 'stages' of death, the Thanatoids being "like death,
only different."  No one is really dead-no one ever dies (like tv,
kinda?)  perhaps what TRP presents is the end of death, the
breakdown of the 1 and 0 into something more
complicated--transformation.  but into what? is it salvation,
immortality, the ultimate promise of the conspiracy?  or dissolution,
entropy?  thus in GR people don't die, they disappear, cross over,
form and reform, and if transformation does not take place (as von
Braun tells us in the epigraph it always will) then there is
dissolution, hopelessness, chaos.  and the pynchonian dilemma
remains: will you be 'part of the system', choosing to sacrifice your
will and individuality to the 'grand design' for salvation of your
soul?  or will you fight cooptation by the conspiracy and in stead
simply fall apart, dissolve, collapse, be crushed by pessimism? "

Welcome! And very appropriate comments indeed.

All this can be traced back to Eliot and "death's other kingdom" and
through TS (Not Tyrone) to Dante, where people can be in Hell while
their bodies are still "alive".  Roger and Pig's escape from the Dinner
suggests that there are alternatives, ways to slip out between the bars,
places that must exist between the one and zero, but you have to look hard
to find them and act quick to get to them.


On another note, for conspiracy buffs and/or cyberfreaks, check out the
new Fox show VR5, where Lori Singer slips her  receiver into the wrong
modem and discovers that she can warp right into other people's subconscious!
At the end of the first show, she's recruited for government (?) work
by something called the Committee, which may or may not have something to
do with the death of her father and sister 17 years earlier.  There are
lots of sly references to other films and tv shows (her link to the 
Committee is one Dr. Frank Morgan, the name of the actor who played the
Wizard of Oz, her lobotomized-looking mother is played by ex-Nurse Ratched
Lousie Fletcher, and so forth).  It looks like a promising show.

--Don Larsson, Mankato State U., MN