VLVL2 (1): Zoyd and the Sixties (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

This article addresses, to an extent, many of the things we've been discussing about Vineland thus far, including the notion of WORK that Terrance brought up, the political issues raised by Doug, and the suggestions of sexuality I mentioned in an earlier post:

 
"In Vineland's first sentence, Zoyd Wheeler (Frenesi's ex-husband, father of their daughter, Prairie) wakes up in the summer of 1984, and prepares for an odd ritual. Each year, in order to receive his mental disability check, Zoyd must commit some public act that testifies to his insanity. A hippie, pot-smoking, small time rock and roll playing, long haired freak of the 60s, Zoyd is a picturesque character; he is very 60s. In fact, Zoyd is part of a government funded program designed to keep the memory of the 60s alive as a memory of insanity, and the opening scene of the novel is a comic conflation of representations of the 60s in the age of Reagan: A hippie wearing a dress, wielding a chain saw, performing a self- and property-destroying act which is broadcast live on television.
 
"One of the greatest threats of the 60s, according to the Right, was its blurring of gender divisions. The hippie was already feminized by his long hair and lack of aggressivity (although at the same time he was -- inexplicably -- appealing to many women). Zoyd's dress heightens the gender confusion but, through its absurdity, disarms it. This hippie, in his ridiculous K-Mart dress, can be no threat to traditional masculinity -- he's just crazy. But with his chain saw, the 60s representative is also a physical danger. He's Charles Manson, the hippie as Satanic mass killer. And with the reintroduction of a physical threat, the sexual threat also returns as Zoyd, now armed as well as cross-dressed, enters the loggers' bar.

"The figure of Zoyd at the Log Jam brings together parodies of feminism, gay activism, and senseless 80s violence all as progeny of the old 60s hippie. And this is precisely the Reaganist view of the 60s: a source of political and especially sexual violence and chaos. As this opening scene of Vineland suggests, Reaganism had (and the New Right continues to have) an overriding interest in subsidizing and perpetuating the memory of the 60s in these terms. And so the 60s enter the 80s in Vineland as the Reaganist 80s would want to see them, as an aging hippie wearing a dress hurtling through a window for the local news.


continued . . .
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030715/27ac4651/attachment.html>