VLVL2 (1): Narrator's Voice

[mjoseph at rci.rutgers.edu]

Toby,

Maybe Desmond is God?

It's the consistency of chocolate that is lethal to dogs, no, so 
chocolate flavored cereal wouldn't be harmful - still, that's a 
brilliant insight, Toby. Couple of things about this catch my eye. 
Desmond has eaten Zoyd's breakfast, nominally making a "dog's breakfast" 
out of what Zoyd would eat. A dog's breakfast idiomatically suggests the 
variety of sublunary stuff (gravity's rainbow) Zoyd will have to 'eat' 
to survive. (Is there a buried allusion to The Trial here as well?)

Count Chocula is a cool example of the play of oppositions in Vineland, 
in which Pynchon alludes to his own dialectal methodology by 
gesturing at the culture's familiarity with the 
sophisticated concept of the codependence of opposites - including 
the opposition of life and death. Perhaps there is a notion here that 
humanity is also capable of having an intuitive grasp of sophisticated 
concepts.

The 15th century Cardinal, Nicholas of Cusa, wrote about the coidentity 
of opposites as the "coincidentia oppositorum," a term he used to 
describe God's transrational capacity to accept unreconciled oppositions 
within Himself - a mode of being unavailable to rational humanity 
(although available through faith or what Mircea Eliade, who later used 
the term as the center of his philosophy of religion, called 
"hierophany.")

Similarly, Desmond (ironically, the only creature introduced so far with 
a human name) can reconcile oppositions within himself by consuming
Count Chocula, which, as you point out, implies a kind of transcendence 
over death. (Just as, later, he transcends mortality again, it is 
implied, by consuming the violent jays.)


Michael


> "shaking his head at the chocolate crumbs on the dog's face" (4,8)
> 
> It is fairly well known that chocolate can be fatal to dogs.  I 
suppose
> that like any poison, dogs brought up eating small amounts can develop 
a
> tolerance, but the fact that Prarie fed the Count Chocula to the dog
> probably has some meaning.  Any ideas?
> 
> Toby
> 

> The one thing that leapt out at me after I read the introduction to 
Pale
> Fire one day and the first section of Vineland the next  day was the
> vocabulary levels.  As with GR and M&D, I needed the dictionary at 
hand
> as I read through the intro to PF.  Sure, most of the words were
> decipherable through context, and some were halfway familiar, but 
reading
> with the dictionary open for me adds another dimension of enjoyment to 
a
> work of literature.  The startling thing to me was that there were NO
> words that needed a dictionary in the opening section to Vineland.  
I've
> read the book at least a half a dozen times before and this never 
crossed
> my mind, but I think this is where much of the disrespect that 
Vineland
> gets from Pynchon fans comes from, the fact that any reasonably read
> tenth grader could cruise through this novel.  
> 
> I found the narrator's voice in Vineland to be similar to that of the
> narrator in Gravity's Rainbow, a warm caring person aghast at the 
events
> he is describing.
> 
> I think the cries that "Pynchon has lost it!" that were heard after 
the
> release of Vineland have to do with the vocabulary.  But it seems 
pretty
> clear to me that Pynchon made a conscious choice to write in a more
> vernacular tone.
> 
> Toby
> 
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