potboiler?!

[PETER A WATTS]

Mr. Layman's considerations on Vineland get to what I think are very 
important issues about the book. I think using what he implies about old 
Tom disguising the epistemic issues with in a less forbidding garment 
than the size 14 psychedelic dress that may describe the form of GR and 
hallucenogenic, paranoid progress of CL49 as well as Zoyd's all but 
unnoticed lunatic's uniform, one can get at some of the significance of 
Vineland in the overal setting of Pynchon's work.

I find fascinating the amazing extent to which Zoyd's characterization
sort of prefigures the response mr P. guessed Vineland would get. In this 
book, instead of using the well-proven, finally accepted and expected 
transfenestrative technique of novels past opts to show up at his 
typewriter like Zoyd at the Log Jam "and see what develops from there."

This is illustrative to the extent that I believe Pynchon, writing 
Vineland, didn't have the drive to prove himself through the execution of 
elaborate formal wizardry that may well have been a big part of the 
formation of his previous novels. It is misleading because formal tactics 
do play a very important role in Vineland. The difference is that now the 
goal of these tactics seem now to be aimed more at drawing the reader in, 
with shades of Wm. Gibson and Douglas Adams in tone and plot, than with 
impressing the literary world with retooling of Faulknerian and Joycean 
narrative approaches. 

This is just a superficial aspect of the difference manifest in Vineland 
however. there is a much more important and related thematic transistion 
at work here. 
Pynchon's most enduring thematic constellation throughout his novels is 
that of family and inheiritance. With this in mind one can see the 
development of his view on the subject through the course of the novels, 
and, further how Vineland is where the powerful ambivalence is resolved.
In the early novels the characters are ripped away from their 
inheiritance and ancestry and plots are constelled around the search for 
meaning in this vein, the reinstatement of the family relation. But the 
process is always one of paranoia and fetishism; the characters reinstate 
continuity through psychoses or by seeking icons that become inadequate 
substitues for the authority and truth, religion and mythos that is 
normally provided by family or cultural stuctures. Pynchon and his 
characters feel a deep sense of emptiness due to the postmodern vacuity
of objective value or spirituality. In Vineland, the problem is resolved 
in the end because the question is reformulated. 
In the formulation of Prairie's quest for her Mother Pynchon subverts the 
archetype he perfected. Prairie gets where Oedipa, Stencil, and Slothrop 
never got: to a concrete, and narrated resolution. This moment in 
Vineland is both an Anti-climax and, potentially, a moment of powefull 
revelation (at least for the reader). What is revealed here, and at the 
family reunion at the end, is that the imago of mohterhood or family is 
not all as perfect as we have hoped. BUT it IS a mother, a real one, and 
a real family. This is a wonderful thing that has been missing all along.
It won't solve all human problems of identity and knowledge and 
continuity, but it is a starting point. 
Here is revealed much about the development of Pynchons stance on culture 
and knowledge and identity. What we have to define ourselves is a fucked 
up, random patchwork of shit. We can lament and remain static, we can 
adopt psychotic adjustments to reality and usefull paranoias, perhaps, 
like pynchon we can set about re-arranging and using the pieces of the 
quilt of our heritage to their fullest and make something wonderful, 
meaningful and something which can be communicated after all, despite the 
difficulty.
well, that's my take anyway.
I realize that this is all abstract so far. It's been a while since i 
read the book, but I have always felt that it was the most rewarding of 
pynchons novels, if perhaps not the most complex or challenging.
I look forward to hearing other contentions on the novel, especially 
regarding Mr. layman's reference to the unique informational quality of 
Prairie's search.
"as we like to say here at world of Burgers :Don't get any on ya."


-uwattp00 at mcl.ucsb.edu
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