Vineland

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

Thomas Vieth writes:
> I think the Tube is much more important. The Tube not only Vineland's
> variation on Gravity'S Rainbow's Hollywood movies (which would make it
> important enough as metaphor and allegory), but it is also the very
> instrument of fascism! Think of the passage close to the end, where the
> older folks of the family reunion sit around and wonder wether the
> darkness of political America is only lit by a bunch of tubes. When I
> remember correctly even the term fascism appears somewhere there.

Pynchon's interest in communication and its breakdown (remember all
that entropy and information theory stuff) should suggest that any
direct sustained reference to communication media would have a direct
and significant purpose. In the case of GR and Vineland I believe the
concentration on film and TV is intended to emphasise the shift from
texts and images originally used as both a means of broadcasting and
sharing information and understanding to mass printing, film and TV as
a means of manipulating an audiences emotions and ultimately their
reason and judgements. Film and TV represent a qualitative shift in
this process since they introduce radically different means of
expression to text. Pynchon's genius is to reconstruct and apply, in
simulacrum at least, these `same' tricks in a text. The simulacrum
borrows the power of the technique imitated whilst at the same time
undermining it by representing it in different guise, breaking the
familiarity, the learned response, on which its effect invariably
depends.

These developments in media technology have been used to concentrate
power in the hands of those who own and/or manage the technology -
just like the technologies of the industrial revolution which the
Luddites tried so hard to regulate on a popular basis. Information
abuse - propaganda - has been central to the healthy development of
capitalism. What else is advertising (don't tell me advertising is not
propaganda it merely serves to keep a buying public informed of their
favoured and best purchasing options - yeah and bears don't shit in
the woods when there is no one around to hear them fart). Not
surprising the Nazis get a look in in GR since they were the early
masters of film propaganda. Not surprising also that US TV is next in
line in Vineland since it is the most obvious inheritor of this
particular Nazi tradition. And least surprising of all should be the
ambiguity in Pynchon's translation of techniques form other media to
text. He wins twice, both by harnessing the power of the translated
technique to create new literary effects while simultaneously
undermining the technique in its original medium, diminishing its
power and thereby the power of those who use it to manipulate people
for their own ends.


Andrew Dinn
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And though Earthliness forget you,
To the stilled Earth say:  I flow.
To the rushing water speak:  I am.