Woge, Thanatoids and Spirits

[Matt Treyvaud]

On Tue, 8 Dec 1998 Cchoskin at aol.com wrote:

> ' "Purring into Transcendence": Pynchon's Puncutron Machine'.  After reading
> this I went back and tried to find all the mentions of ghosts, spirits and
> other beings from another realm.  If somebody has already done some sort of
> index of this I would be glad to see it.

[dudulent list snipped for spatial reasons]

And don't forget Zoyd haunting Frenesi in the shower.  This may be too
simplistic, but I remember I was pretty happy with the throngs of spirits
in Vineland as magical-realist 'the past comes back to haunt you' flavour.
Was Zoyd really haunted by anyone? I can't remember it - and he was
instrumental in the defeat of the UFO people in the Battle of the
Synthesised Ukeleles (instrumental - get it?)  And, I hate to open this
can of worms again, but I think he's the one who's most distant from
having 'sold out' in some way or another (apart from the kids, but see
below). Everyone else has something in their past: Frenesi's
revolutionism, Takeshi was in another novel ;)  In a similar way, the 80s
as a whole could be said to be haunted by the people, living and dead, who
were marginalised or killed as a result of the then-government's social
policies (that passage about what sort of creature would be defined by a
binary code of lifes and deaths...?) 

The past always catches up with you - this definitely ties in with the
notion of 'karmic adjustment'. If you don't heed the warning of the
spirits you inadvertently created, you end up as one yourself.

The children, especially Prairie, have no dark histories apart from a few
full nappies. Nevertheless, they still have to face the results of what
their -parents- did; and pardon me for spraying schmaltz on y'all, but I
think the final Brock-Prairie scene is authorially supportive of the idea
that they can be victorious over The Past.

Like I said, a pretty simplistic theory, and I've only read the book 1.2
times. But given Pynchon's happy obsession with (and continual fooling
around with) causality and consequences, I don't think it's entirely
worthless as an idea.

Matt