Cowart on Vineland

[Terrance]

Phil Wise wrote:


> 
> > "Pynchon exposes the millenarian canker in the flower
> > children as rigorously as he diagnoses the reactionary
> > carcinoma of the next generation...Pynchon makes his
> > political sympathies plain enough. But the polemics have
> > little to do with the novel's art, which one sees in the
> > indirection and economy that deliver this and the other
> > Pynchon works from the realm of propaganda and didacticism.
> > This author's art--an art far superior, it seems to me, to
> > that od such novelists on the left as Dos Passos, Steinbeck
> > or Vonegut--commands the aesthetic interest of readers  who
> > may find the politics somewhat overwrought...He remains the
> > only contemporary writer whose grasp of history's mythic
> > dimensions merits comparison with that of Joyce..."
> >
> >
> > I think one of the most interesting clues to Pynchon's view
> > of things is that he has Jess Becker quoting James quoting
> > Emerson, "Secret retributions are always restoring the
> > level, when disturbed, of the divine justice."
> >
> > Jumpin Jane O'
> >
> I agree that Pynchon's art is extraordinary, especially the way the texts
> allow so many different readings.  His novels are both/and - or the whole
> lot.  I've enjoyed your posting on the spiritual/religious aspects of
> pynchon; you seem to have tapped a rich vein.  I also feel his political
> analysis is far subtler than Cowart gives him credit for in Vineland; one
> set of readings in no way negates the other, not with this guy.
> 
> Phil

I don't think Cowart's is all that interested in the
political Pynchon. Cowart would probably agree that the
texts permit "both/and" (Moore's term here extended I
presume,
though I'm not sure it applies as it has been used here and
as you are applying it, but in the interest of Pluralism and
Peace, OK , but and....), but and  of course Cowart is
stunned
by Vineland, as were many critics, not so much because the
politics were not 
what they presumed, but because "Attenuated Postmodernism"
is Modernism, and is
most Modern when it comes to the non-deconstruction of MYTH.
What does VL & M&D tell us about the Pynchon industries
readings and "misreadings" of his earlier texts? Can
Weisenburger's Fables of Subversion be applied to M&D?
Surely P changes, develops. Characterization is radically
not only a different color after GR it's a different horse
or animal--Human, but  the politics as
science/religion--Spengler or Vogelin--
genetics/communication are only made more clear and so clear
in fact that the critics can't talk about what is in the
text but need to go out of it to make their arguments. 

The "both/and" reading needs textual support before we can
determine if the text allows for "both/and" and what this
tension means. I belive in Pynchon's texts, all of them, we
are dealing with an agon sustained and not a dialectic, a
both/and, but this does not mean that the "both" and the
"and" are not specifically and clearly defined and set in
conflict in the texts. 

When Prairie is a baby where the hell is Zoyd and what has
happened to Frenesi? 

Her father lays his screed on the postpartum daughter and
this this is set against Brock
Vond's visitations and Pynchon has no problem putting them
in bed together. He's not simple that Pynchon guy. He's not
that radical Lefty propaganda, he's not alluding to Lesbian
Eskimo narratives, he's never been the Academic Lefty and
those that are convinced that he must be against capitalism
or American free trade or USA "democracy" have some
explaining to do. Where is the support from a Pynchon text? 

I want to comment on Prairie's friends, her boy and girl
friend.  Zoyd is in some respects a  typical father and his
misgivings about R2D2-the Jason that might have his pruning
hooks a little to deep in his daughter's open mind-are
characteristic of healthy generation gap family politics. 
However, after Zoyd gives his daughter his lurid dress-which
she will not wear for many interesting reasons- he DRAGS his
cynical, paranoid and "PUBLICLLY CRAZY" experiences into the
private father and daughter discussion. 

TV? 

 "Dad, that's exactly the way I feel too...that she's the
only one for
me." (54) 

Prairie wants the TV family. Is this simply because TV
creates, perpetuates, the ideal white bread Reagan family or
is it a little deeper than the screen? 

This is the cold comfort Frenesi got from her old man all
over
again. 


"Hey, do you ever date logger types...a couple of these guys
slipped me their phone numbers...along with bills in
different denominations."  When his daughter takes the
"female"  moral high road in the discussion, "Love is
strange, Dad, maybe you forgot that." Zoyd regresses into
cynical memories of love as a four letter word and then
takes the "male" moral low road in the discussion, "take it
from an old mental case, he's [Isaiah] in some trouble." 

Now this is funny, seems like the guy has a very witty
daughter and the banter seems healthy to a point, but is
it? 

These are not GR characters anymore. 


Prairie's attempt to  convince her father that R2D2 can be
trusted is played out in the haircut, business venture,
music, etc., motifs that all rotate about the mother
[Frenesi] figure's 
missing but haunting presence, the physical absence brings
to the conversation Prairie's need to feel whole in the
unity of her parents, a very powerful force in this novel.


So powerful that Prairie "had been ready to go with him
[Hector] to find
Frenesi." 


Prairie's girlfriend is a criminal in part because she wants
to go to prison to escape the abuse she has for a family. In
prison she will find an all girl family and things will be
better she imagines. Kinda like out of the frying pan and
into the fire. 
And what's pushing her there? The Weissmann of this
novel--Brock Vond? I don't think so. 

In ch.2 p14 Zoyd returns home "in time to view himself on
the Tube" and spend a little "quality time" with his
daughter Prairie. Their conversation seems familiar, Father
and Daughter- "Dad."  We recognize the characteristic cross
generational or cross cultural private dialogue of a young
precocious and amusingly sarcastic Californian teenage girl
and her burnt out, though witty, defensive and
daughter-curious Oldman- "Fresh, rilly." However, the
underlying irony sustained by the subject of their
conversation ("it" or the dress) invites us to consider what
we know about it (the dress) from chapter one and
complicates the seemingly familiar relationship of Father
and Daughter. The fragments or clips from chapter one begin
to form a link to the 1960s that controls and determines 
the lives and relationships of the charaters.   "Can I have
it when your done? Use it to cover my futon."  In chapter
one, "a girl younger than his daughter screamed at him out
her window-"Calvin doesn't cut anything bigger than a 14 and
you ought to be locked up." 


He will be locked up. By Vond. 



Prairie complains, she's not as slow as Slothrop, that the
men/boys are "handing her back and forth like a side of
beef. 

Zoyd has some interst in young girs just like Vond. 


And he is after all: as Prairie conceives him "this
scroungy, usually slow-witted
fringe element he'd been assigned, on this planet, for a
father,"  A"Damn fool, Sent so
gaga by those mythical days of high drama that he'd
forgotten he and
Prairie might actually have to go on living years beyond
them," a paranoid
pothead-"Sheez" says his daughter, "All that shit you smoke,
your brain
must be like a Etch-A-Sketch." 

Can she trust her oldman? 

"Sure this ain't pothead paranoia?" she asks. 

The jailbait and B material he dates cause him
to refrain from embracing his daughter and he lets her "find
and follow her
own way to sleep." 

"Zoyd had no clear idea of what Prairie might be going
into, felt helpless, didn't even know if he'd missed
something last night
and she was really going away for good." Zoyd's fatherly
advice to his
"side of beef" "How about pork" is to "Keep' em legs
together, teen bimbo."


The novel is all about V, as in Virginity. Lost? Broken,
spilled. 



Aghghghghh, it's so nice out....This was a discount store,
now it's turned into a cornfield You got it, you got it
Don't leave me stranded here, I can't get used to this
lifestyle....gone to WAshington SQ, gunna play a little b
and speed chess and blow my kazoo too.