Vineland

[andrew at cee.hw.ac.uk]

davemarc at panix.com writes:

re youngsters voluntarily signing up for the CIA:

> I'm recalling how, at the reunion, the family elders debate "the perennial
> question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist
> twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago." 
> My interpretation of this is that it represents an underlying process in
> Pynchon/Vineland--pondering the question of whether the US is fascist but
> not arriving at conclusions.  I assume that when we talk about Nazi
> Germany, we are certain that it was fascist.

Well, I don't think I said the US was fascist and I don't really think
it's the appropriate term to use. I did say the US had inherited and
refined propaganda techniques first developed by the Nazis. The
refinement is not just in the nature of the propaganda itself but also
in the way the system has avoided the official brutality which is so
central to fascism. Brutality has been so successfully privatised
under capitalism so that it is average Joe Shmoe US citizens who keep
other US citizens in their place rather than secret police or storm
troopers. In the 50s the system depended on whistle blowers like
Reagan to shop those who harboured un-American ideals. In Pynchon's
1984 most people just don't have any such ideals. prevailing opinion
steers most people away from anything so dangerous very early on.

re Chinese propaganda:
> That, I think, is actually the main thrust of much propaganda: not
> to convince all of its recipients that all of it is true, but to
> present a mountain of deception that amounts to intellectual
> aggression.  Absorbing lies all the time, while dissent and debate
> are violently suppressed, chips away at intellectual morale.  Lively
> understanding rarely comes from dictation; it tends to come from
> exploration, which is stifled in places like China--and which was
> also stifled in Nazi Germany.  There is much more opportunity for
> the stuff in the US.

Yes and no. More opportunities may be true, but which opportunities?
Who dictates what opportunities exist? The US people at large or
corporations and media moguls? And the point is not that opportunities
are not there if not for the taking then at least for making. For some
people there is some limited opportunity to exercise their own
political and social ideas. We are allowed to discuss our options,
even have our own ideas of what would be a Utopia, even make our own
attempts to realise such Utopias. What we are not able to do is i)
ensure that most people are aware of how rotten things are and ii)
present radical arguments against the status quo in place of the
tired, formulaic dichotomies the media recycles whenever any such
question is raised. The debate is already preprogrammed in the
intellectual climate of our culture and may only develop along
sanctioned lines (the UK is no better in this respect - witness the
political muzak which we have had by way of an election campaign here
in the last few weeks). Any attempt at an expose or a revision of
fundamental principles is rapidly rerouted by the media treatment it
receives into the simplistic and familiar formats of TV news/current
affairs/commentary, formats which deracinate any radical elements of
the debate thanks to the self-censorship achieved by by donning such a
formal strait-jacket, the humdrum monotony which an argument acquires
when clothed in such media garb. Net result is that one has to live
within the system with almost no opportunity to change the most
important determinants of circumstance.

> . . . Now, if I were to look
> for a precedent for the Nazi system, I might look more quickly at the pre
> WWII US, and, even moreso, the pre WWI US, and even moreso, the pre Civil
> War US, and even moreso, the pre US under Great Britain (the amount of
> advertising declining steadily as the regression into the past continues),
> but I still think that other governments might provide even better analogs.

I don't deny such blatant propaganda exists in other countries. When I
singled out the US as the inheritor of the Naxi's legacy my point was
not that US propaganda was the same as in Nazi Germany. On the
contrary that US propaganda has taken propaganda one step further in a
way that say Chinese propaganda (as you describe it) has not.  The US
media have perfected the use of propaganda to the extent that most of
its citizens don't regard what they are fed as being propaganda. The
Nazis were lucky enough to be able to use more primitive techniques to
achieve the same effect because their population was not
propaganda-savvy.   But that is not how it works now. Everyone is
media-savvy these days. Except in reality everyone just thinks they
are media-savvy. But TV still manages to run rings round people no
matter how much they think they are in control. This is the real
battle, not conning people about particular matters of fact but
conning them about the quality of the information sources they rely on
to the point that they no longer question (know how to question) the
validity, coherence and completeness of the information and opinions
on which they are asked to base their judgements. You don't need bars
when people lock the doors in their own minds.

re whether advertising and TV have won the war:

> I guess I mostly take issue with the remark that the war's over.  I think
> that's your opinion about what's going on in the US, but not what's in
> Vineland, which I think is more concerned with pondering the state of the
> war.  I think there's some humility in Vineland (and Pynchon in general)
> regarding the ability to state accurately and authoritatively "how things
> are" or even "how things were."  Pynchon does a great job of visualizing
> history, but it's significant that he does so through a fiction that is
> full of distortions and questions.

If you question whether the war is won consider the number of hours
people watch television, the lack of control people exercise over what
they watch, the lack of alternative sources of information and
commentary, the dramatic behavioural shifts which people undergo when
viewing, the frightening passivity with which people absorb TV and
advertising input, its terrible effectiveness in selling product from
politicians to perfume to life-styles.

Pynchon may have been making a joke when he had Hector humming the
Flintstones theme on the run from tubal detox but it was also a
palpable hit at TV. You may consider the use of TV images all the way
through to be nothing more than a riff on the kute kliches of TV
plotting, character and setting. Ditto for the film borrowings in
GR. But to me such a deliberate pastiche (yes, I do mean pastiche,
John) suggests that there is a critical comment wrapped up in this
(re)presentation.

But ignoring questions of the book's form let's consider two examples
where TV images are commented on explicitly. Recall Zoyd in his 50th
floor Hawaiian hotel room after his arguiment with Frenesi on the
balcony. The only thing stopping him from jumping is the thought of
Steve Lord arriving on the scene and saying "Book him, Danno, suicide
one". The other example is Hector meeting Frenesi at the airport
trying to sell her the idea for his blockbuster movie/TV series (I
forget which). In both cases these are poeple in extremis. They are
cracking up, breaking apart. And in both cases TV, the glitz and
glamour of TV, TV characters and locations, the possibility of
entering into TV's fairyland world have become central to the
character's worldview, have begun to seem more real than their `real'
world, have begun to invade not just their fantasies but their
decision making processes and desires. TV has become their touchstone
of familiarity, security, wisdom and justice, presents the paradigms
which they aspire to and judge by. (Other examples are Frenesi
masturbating with submissive delight in front of her her favourite TV
fascist fantasy or Prairie displaying herself for Zoyd in her mind's
eye in all the lace-clad glory advertising can muster)

> > Yes America is different. It's the same old story - the rich
> > using their wealth to deny opportunity to the poor - only in the US it
> > has been refined and refined to the point where it is a pushover.

> Is that it?  Is that the whole story?  That's what I'd call a short short
> short story.  I think it's worth at least a couple of sentences more. 
> Pynchon himself has written over a thousand pages on it so far.  Would he
> have bothered if it were that simple?

No, of course it's not the whole story. But propaganda is a central
plank in American capitalism's success. And the power of propaganda
*is* a definite theme in Pynchon's work, in GR as much as in Vineland.
Much as Pynchon's acknowledges that a worm has room to turn even when
trapped within the core of a rotten apple my reading is that he
expects most worms to stay right where they are, eating shit.


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