Vineland's verisimilitude

[Doug Millison]

I spent the winter, 1979-1980, among the pot grower community in
Garberville, CA (the Salmon Creek area, for those of you who may know the
micro-scenes up there, cruising occasionally to  Whale Gulch; New Year's
Eve party at the Garberville Fire House), and will testify that Pynchon did
an excellent job of capturing the essence of that scene (late '70s, early
'80s, not the late '60s) in Vineland. I met the guy who brought the first
cannabis seeds back from Afghanistan to Garberville, back in the early
'70s, a dealer of the "heroic" variety, if you will; I knew many gentle
souls who were surviving and supporting families on one or two pounds of
killer buds per annum; and I knew of some Johnny-come-latelys who were
creating large, commercial scale farms and guarding them with lots of guys
with guns, the beginning of the hardcore crowd. This was a fairly broad
cross-section of people, from all sorts of backgrounds and educations --
the way they talked was varied, to say the least. I knew one old grizzled
grower who had made up all his own words for things -- "goozer" for "mouth"
for example.

The bigger question is, how accurate can dialogue in a book really be? It's
entirely possible that I haven't read enough books yet, but I'm not sure
that I can point to a single novel that contains dialogue that truly
recreates spoken conversation.

Over the years in my work as a journalist, I've tape-recorded hundreds of
interviews and transcribed them, and they generally require editing to make
them sound like "real speech" -- in conversation, we don't focus on or
necessarily remember all of the repetition, false starts, sentences twisted
out of proportion and abandoned, ellipses, stuttering, mispronounciations,
etc; we tend to filter that out and remember more or less coherent
statements (when the conversation flows well). Dialogue in a novel that
truly recreated the way we really talk would be difficult, if not
excruciating to read -- all the more astonishing that some novelists can
put words in their characters' mouths that sound "real" but not without
care, polish, editing.

Thanks,
Doug

At 8:40 PM 7/3/97, davemarc wrote:
>I tend to agree with Paul Murphy when visiting the Vineland Room at the
>Museum of Pynchon's Ear.  Takeshi's convincing, and so are Prairie and
>Blood & Vato (within a Kinda Kartoony Kontext, o'Kourse).
>
>Maybe Jules's complaint can tell us a bit about linguistics over time.
>
>In his "meshugginah posts" post, he writes, "if you actually lived in
>Northern
>California and the dope-dealing scene, as both Anita and I did, then you
>find Vineland very difficult to take. The language is invented. No one
>talked that way. If you don't know how they did talk, this is no big deal.
>If you do, it's quite annoying and ultimately makes it impossible to enjoy
>the book."
>
>But Jules's website says:
>
>"he has been living in Cancun with his family since 1983, in Mexico, since
>1981,"
>
>and
>
>"In 1981, he moved with his family to Mexico, and began The Real Mexico,
>currently still in progress."
>
>and
>
>"In 1983, he came to Cancun to work as a public relations consultant for
>Fonatur, the Mexican national tourism development fund. From 1984 to date,
>he has carried out various promotional and graphic design projects for
>clients in tourism, publishing and government in Cancun. In 1991, he was
>awarded First Prize, Computer Graphic Design, Casa de la Cultura de Cancun.
>During his stay in Mexico, his works have been published in English and
>Spanish by The Miami Herald, The Mexico City News, Cancun Tips Magazine,
>Diario de Quintana Roo and the Caribbean News." 
>
>This leaves me with the impression that Jules was not living in Vineland
>Country in 1984, the time of those Vineland accents.   Maybe things had
>changed a little in the time since Jules went south of the border.
>
>Pynchon admits that, in the Sixties at least, his Ear was not in good
>shape.  (Perhaps some envious adversary of his had chewed it a bit too
>much--it's been known to happen.)   Pynchon's implication is that his Ear
>is much better in Vineland and M&D.
>
>Regarding his use of "meshugginah," I don't think there's much of a problem
>here.  As Jules and others have pointed out, it's exactly the kind of
>"misuse" one might expect of a goy like George Washington.  So where's the
>problem.  As Tevye might have said, it's a tradition.  Just like JFK
>mangling German.
>
>davemarc


D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com