VLVL2 The Return of Weed Atman

[Ghetta Life]

>From: Toby G Levy <tobylevy at juno.com>
>
>"I'm a pilgrim...who's taken ten years of your time just to get this far.  
>The network has been buzzing, like, 'for a while' with stories about this 
>karmic adjuster working out of Shade Creek, who actually gets results? I've 
>come to ask him to take my case."
>
>Unlike the other Thanatoids in the book up to this point,Weed Atman is 
>clearly dead.  The other Thanatoids might be dead, but could be thought to 
>be "like dead, only different" in that their lives are over except for the 
>all consuming desire for revenge on real and assumed wrongs done to them in 
>the earlier parts of their lives.

What evidence do you have that Weed is any different than the other 
Thanatoids?  Is it that you know Weed's history, but not the others'?  
There's no textual support for making Weed any more or less dead than the 
others.

>But in accepting the character of Weed Atman ten years after his very 
>certain death, we have to come to a decision here.  Are we to assume that 
>Pynchon wants us to believe that in the context of the novel people return 
>from death to seek revenge?  That ghosts exist on the same plane as the 
>living and interact with them?  Then Vineland becomes a fantasy.

I don't think "fantasy" is the right word.  Try "allegory."  Also,  I 
wouldn't say the Thanatoids haven't  "returned from the dead," they're just 
dead, but with a bit of animation.  And the suggestion is that they'd rather 
not be animated, but that the injustices inherent in the circumstances of 
their death compels them to keep mulling over their fate.  I think the 
"results" they seek is peace, sleep.  And to a very large degree their 
function in this book is as reminders to those living of something they'd 
rather forget, so they exist not so much for themselves in this regard.

Your fear of accepting the unreal in Pynchon's texts evidenced in what you 
find more "satisfying" below limits your understanding of the writing, 
forcing you to rewrite it in your head.

Ghetta

>On the other hand, could it not be that the story that Takeshi and DL are 
>telling to Prairie is the fantasy.  That they are describing the 
>resurrection of a memory of DL's dead comrade and not the resurrection of 
>the person himself. This interpretation is much more satisfying to me.

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