potboiler?!

[WKLJAZZ at aol.com]

On Saturday, September 2nd, Peter Watts wrote, regarding VINELAND, that --

<my position is that it is step forward from the <epistemelogical angst so 
<powerfully present in the earlier novels. 

   I'm reluctant to challenge anyone who has already promised to start his
tenure on the list by "shooting down [a] position in detail," but perhaps
I'll start with a question and a comment rather than a complete argument.

   "Epistemological angst" might be translated as anxiety about whether
anything is ultimately knowable or, perhaps, about the relative value of what
passes for "knowledge" in a world (and beyond?) as complex and multilayered
as this one.  If this is a reasonable definition, then is Peter suggesting
that VINELAND is better because it somehow disposes of, avoids or "goes
beyond" this huge issue?  If it does, then I'd argue that it's a much lesser
achievement than GR, COL49 or V.  Instead, however, I'd say that VINELAND is
terrific because it continues to fuss at "epist. angst" but without quite so
much hoo-ha.

  IMHO, VINELAND stands somewhere in a class with GR (not equivalent to it,
but somewhere in the Zone, and who really cares exactly where) because it
continues to raise the hard questions (like that of the ultimate value of
knowledge and intellect versus human qualities less easily quantified and
co-opted).  I think that VINELAND bugged a bunch of the Pynchon-loving
critics when it first appeared (see Brad Leithauser in the NY Review of
Books, for example) because it seemed too easy, too light, too -- well --
normal.  A couple of readings later, though, it seems to me that TRP's "most
accessable novel to date" is not nearly as normal -- or as epistomelogically
chilled out -- as it first seemed.

   While I gather up my larger argument, I'd simply throw out the obvious --
that Prairie's (partly computerized, partly cinematic and partly
journalistic) gathering of knowledge/intelligence about her mother is
ultimately exposed as limited and, probably, misleading.  Like Oedipa, she
gets more and more information, but it doesn't really get her any closer to
some "truth" which, if it exists at all, is probably genetically festering in
Prairie herself and findable only the hard way, the way we all find stuff
out, by screwing up and living to take another shot.  The more doors all that
"knowledge" opens up, the more confusing choices she faces, and when Prairie
finally meets Frenesi we get one of Tom's classic anti-climaxes (what does
Tyrone finally learn? what will Oedipa meet upon the crying? what has Stencil
ultimately uncovered? . . .), a barely even narrated reunion with Mom in
which Prairie seems to find a person hardly worthy of the portrait painted by
Prairie's (and DL's? and Zoyd's?) desire.

   If a person feels certain that VINELAND is easier to get through than GR,
I can hardly disagree, but the book itself is not a narrative of certainty.
 I'd say that its primary virtue is its clever masquerade as a simpler book,
written by an author suddenly less abiguous than his celebrated, earlier
self.  It's a fine book, not because it is less "epistomelogically
agnst"-filled but precisely because it can fool you into thinking so.

-- Will Layman