The Italian Wedding Fake Book

[David Casseres]

Paul York sez

>I think the fact that _Vineland_ is set in a time and place that 
>is more historically and culturally immediate can leave one with 
>the impression of transparency that is maybe a little deceptive.  Behind 
>the glow of the tube is, I feel, is the true dark force of _Vineland_ 
>(Brock, after all, lacks the sort of terrible presence that seems to 
>permeate Pynchon's earlier books):  a system of paranoia that keeps 
>people divided and asking the wrong questions.

I agree.  And just the other evening I ran into a passage, toward the end 
of Gravity's Rainbow, that gave me yet another of those "so *that's* what 
he's trying to tell us" experiences: Pirate Prentice lecturing Roger 
Mexico, who has just gone round the bend into, literally, raving 
paranoia.  Pirate explains to him that if you really want to do paranoia 
right, you need to have not only a Them-system but also a We-system (it's 
the other end of the remark near the beginning that paranoia is just the 
leading edge of the perception that Everything Is Connected).

The narrative then reels off into a lot of loosely connected passages 
that seem to be about Slothrop trying to put together or find some sort 
of a We-system to save his sorry ass.  Slothrop himself is disintegrating 
rapidly as a character and everything gets more and more like a comic 
book or a Busby Berkeley number.  In Gravity's Rainbow, as in V., there 
is no viable We-system; it's a joke.  But The Crying of Lot 49 and 
Vineland are about Us.  This parallels the dichotomy someone proposed 
between the mythical (Them) and subcultural (We) novels.

In Lot 49 and Vineland, the We-system turns out to be mostly a forlorn 
wish, natch.  It doesn't really manage to be a Counterforce after all.  
One reason they're short books.  But as Mason and Dixon comes up over my 
horizon, I am wondering if it will turn out to be, at last, the paranoid 
synthesis that Pirate proposed -- achieved only by going back two hundred 
years to find out who We might be and *how* Everything Is Connected.  
That would be nice.


Cheers,
David