VLVL2(1) Missed Communications: Beginnings

[Paul Nightingale]

Michael Joseph wrote:
> 
> Paul, Good comment on Zoyd's "marginality" and being "out of sync."
> Helps me to see him more clearly as a figure not quite of this world
or
> out of time, a figure that
> bridges the Vineland of the imagination (dreams/sacred) and the
Vineland
> of the actual (of dates, citation, some quite arbitary -Johnny
> Copeland, etc.). I find it intensely satisfying that Pynchon begins
his
> novel by placing a "marginal" character at the upper margin of his
work,
> a self-referential act I see in the illumination of the pigeon, as
well.
>  It's a refinement of the dazzling anacrusis of GR. Ironically, Zoyd
as
> Zed is doubly marginal, a kind of Janus-figure looking backward at the
> upper margin and forward toward the lower margin of the novel. (Am I
> going too far to see a Christian symbolism here as well, echoed
perhaps
> in the Zoyd as child implication?)
> 

Thanks, Michael.

I hadn't really thought about it in terms of sacred/profane, which I
know from Durkheim's work on religion and that's about it (I think).
Research has just turned up Gary Eberle's Sacred Time and the Search for
Meaning (2003). It looks interesting: is that what you mean?

I did start with the difference between natural and clock times, or
cyclical and linear time, all of which is based on an essay by EP
Thompson, "Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism". First
published in the 1960s, the essay is an example of history-from-below of
the kind that has influenced P (eg the Luddite and Sloth essays, as well
as VL and MD). That is, EPT describes forms of popular resistance at a
time when workers were being disciplined to accept clock time generally
and factory hours in particular (something of a travesty, I know, but
it's quite a lengthy essay).

In a passage that prefigures P's Sloth essay (as cited recently by
Bandwraith), EPT writes: "The work-pattern was one of alternate bouts of
intense labour and of idleness, wherever men were in control of their
own working lives. (The pattern persists among some
self-employed--artists, writers, small farmers, and perhaps also with
students--today, and provokes the question whether it is not a 'natural'
human work-rhythm.)" He goes on to discuss Saint Monday (sometimes
followed by Saint Tuesday).

Well that certainly describes Zoyd: he'll do it at his own pace, and to
hell with imposed deadlines! Of course he always does make his deadline,
but resistance is all about performance. Cf Tim's comment on the fig
that requires care: laziness is something we might opt into, and then
out of again.

It (the passage from EPT above) also describes much of the work (labour)
that is featured in VL, so Terrance is right to say the novel is about
work. Furthermore, a refusal to bend to the demands of a straightforward
linear narrative is characteristic of P's writings, most certainly in
VL, where the storytelling meanders where it will, and takes as long as
it will (which he then justifies in the Sloth essay a few years later).

EPT also cites Bourdieu's study of Algerian peasants in the 1950s. B
writes, in a beautiful phrase: "Haste is seen as a lack of decorum
combined with diabolical ambition", going on to note that the clock is
sometimes known as "the devil's mill". One might describe Brock Vond in
the final pages of the novel as, well, hasty.

Anyway, moving away from the opening, briefly, I think
resistance-as-performance is central to VL as a whole and links
late-Pynchon to late-Foucault, ie the Foucault of governmentality and
the knowing subject: Frank Palmieri's paper, "Other than Postmodern?
Foucault, Pynchon, Hybridity, Ethics", is particularly useful in this
respect.