Brit Sweets and Dickens

[jeff severs]

>I wasn't gonna mention this, cause i thought the connection was,
>well, tenuous, but on a rerun of Simpsons i caught recently, an old
>woman who Bart works for in order to earn money so that he can buy a
>comic book, offers him candies of various putrid styles--it had a
>definite Slothrop meets Mrs. Quoad feel...

...and, when connected up with the recent episode in which Homer discovers
his long-lost 60s radical mother on the lam from the law (discussed briefly
here some time ago), suggests that somebody at that smart show has read
Pynchon. I expected some oblique Pynchon reference in that episode, but we
did get Lisa saying as Mom enters: "It's like something out of Dickens!"
Which leads me back to a question of the comparison between TRP and CD I
raised a little while ago. Lisa's right: getting reunited with your mother
whom you know nothing about as she runs from the law is Dickensian, but,
with the turn towards a familial plot in _Vineland_, it's suddenly
Pynchonian as well. The coherence of _Vineland_ (in terms of persons coming
together for "resolution" in the end) is arguably the most you'll ever see
from Pynchon and also marks another sort of Dickensian tendency (though in
a surprisingly shorter form, by both authors' standards). The other
connections are pretty obvious and run throughout Pynchon's work: the
artifice in characterization, the suggestive names, the self-consciousness
about plot and coincidence (on this last point, of course, what might be
benevolent in Dickens is reason for paranoia in Pynchon: Somebody's
controlling all these crazy connections). But until _VL_ Pynchon just
doesn't do much with families -- except as the basis for jokes like the
Mother Conspiracy and Slothrop's mother's letter to Mrs. Kennedy (and here
I admit my shakiness on _V._'s meaning: V. as mythic mother?).

All of which is not to say that the family in _VL_ somehow becomes a
privileged category, distinct from the other social engagements the other
novels probe so well. If anything, the book shows the family to always be
shot through with (if not subordinated to) relationships to State, Police,
the non-domestic world. It's on this topic that Pynchon seems to have the
most in common with Deleuze and Guattari's anti-familialism -- their
insistence that psychoanalysis allows for fascism by localizing psychic
interactions in the dad-mom-child triangle and ignoring investments in the
social sphere prior to the Oedipal complex. The "Cosmic Fascist," as _VL_
puts it, is always with us, from the beginning.

But anyway: can I get anybody to talk with me about _Vineland_ as a rewrite
of Dickens? I don't know enough of Dickens to say exactly which novel, but
_Bleak House_ seems like a great candidate: an orphan daughter gets
reunited with the mother she never knew she had, but then the mother,
unjustly suspected of murder, gets chased down by the daughter and a police
detective...

Cheers,
Jeff