VLVL2 (4) On history

[Paul Nightingale]

In this chapter, significant narrative links to, or echoes of, the
previous three chapters ... Zoyd is on the road again (Ch1); Isaiah
reappears to take Prairie camping, and Zoyd 'loses' his home (Ch2);
Frenesi is absent again, and Doc Deeply catches up with Hector (Ch3).
The result is twofold: (a) Zoyd's role as protagonist, threatened since
the opening pages, is about to come to an end, and (b) Pynchon continues
to discuss the ways in which history can be narrativised. Hence,
discussion of this chapter should address the relationship between those
two features.

Most obviously, there is the individual's ('personalised') history in
the form of flashbacks; there is also the broader
socio-economic/cultural/political history that can be signalled by the
use of shorthand (Reaganomics in Ch3, the war in/on Vietnam in Ch4.
Later on, the novel will be taken up with the kind of account that
combines the personal and the political (as here, today, in Toby's and
Doug's recollections of being drafted).

However, to this point, in a narrative centred on Zoyd, the two kinds of
history have been kept apart. Hector juxtaposes the "real revolution"
(from above) to the "little fantasy handjob you people was into" (27).
The flashback to (the end of) "the Mellow Sixties" (interesting caps,
signifying myth-in-making in anticipation of "greeting cards in another
few years") speculates that Zoyd/Frenesi's wedding is somehow
unconnected to real capital-H History, "off on some other planet" (38).
As jbor notes, the point being it isn't. However, this begs the question
why, what is the narrative function of this arbitrary separation of the
personal from the national/collective/Official? A separation that the
text acknowledges, precisely in order to deny it (just as Frenesi, in
Chs3-4, is absent rather than not-present).

That the wedding doesn't acknowledge clock time, of course, recalls
Zoyd's tardiness in Ch1. There, one might refer to his resistance of the
bureaucratic state; can one also see the wedding as, somehow, an example
of resistance? Well, the service is 'unconventional'; as with Zoyd's
eventual conformity in Ch1, there is always a creative tension between
conformity and resistance.

Furthermore, of the wedding, the texts notes: "It would be easy to
remember the day as a soft-focus shot ..." That is, one might choose to
remember it that way; one might remember it another way. Memory is
always selective. Frenesi's absence in this ch, for example, takes the
form of Zoyd's introspective recollection of meeting and marrying her,
and includes his "recurring fantasy" (36), one in which he becomes, and
wallows in being, the object of her gaze. I think, by the end of this
chapter, it has become apparent that his memory, his recollection (like
his tardiness in Ch1) effectively puts a brake on a narrative that is
only 'liberated' by Prairie's quest for her mother (beginning in Ch5).
For example, note how the Ch4 begins twice: "Zoyd hit Phantom Ridge Road
..." (35), then, the other side of a flashback that includes the
wedding, "He took a left at the row of mailboxes ..." (40).