Vineland's verisimilitude

[Paul Murphy]

Jules' charge of 'bad ear' vis-a-vis Pynchon's use of dialect in Vineland
is duly noted, but I don't fully buy it. For one thing, Vl quite simply
isn't about Northern California drug culture in the 60's -- the communities
TRP invents are much more specific: radical documentarian filmmakers and
student protesters (whose central focus is a professor, Weed Atman). I've
read it twice, and while my memory of it is very hazy (curiously, I find it
his most forgettable work), I can't see how anyone could get the impression
that TRP was trying to mimic the speech patterns of 60's potheads anywhere
in the book. Much more interesting (for me, given my Gen-X subject
position) is the 80's teenspeak TRP conjures with the voice of Prairie,
which I find exaggerated but generally accurate (I mean, rilly). And then
there's Takeshi's voice, which exactly replicates the speech patterns of
dubbed Japanese monster-movies -- his voice doesn't sound like a botched
attempt at verisimilitude, more like an entirely mediated Western
experience of Japanese speech (and I would argue that the 'mediatedness' of
TRP's polylogue novel is the source of much of its comedy).

Cheers,
Paul