VLVL2 (1): _Vineland_ and "Rip Van Winkle" (part 2)

[Tim Strzechowski]

continuing . . .

"Not only the architecture is different, however. On returning to the village, Rip discovers that "[t]he very character of the people seemed changed. There was a busy, bustling disputatious tone about it, instead of the accustomed phlegm and drowsy tranquility" (779). When a "short but busy little fellow . . . pull[s] him by the arm ... and enquire[s] in his ear `whether he was Federal or Democrat?"' (779), the uncomprehending Rip gets himself in a tight spot by crying, "Alas ... I am a poor quiet man, a native of the place, and a loyal subject of the King- God bless him!" (780). Rip has slept through the change in governments; Zoyd and the contemporary American voter have done much the same. 

"Despite his somnolence, however, Zoyd recognizes that the Log Jam is only the latest in a long line of Vineland County bars to undergo gentrification and that the assiduous remodeling by so many bar owners has worked another kind of change in the "very character of the people." As Zoyd explains to Buster, the owner of the Log Jam: "[O]nly reason I'm up here is 'at the gentrification of South Spooner, Two Street, and other more familiar hellraisin' locales has upped the ante way outs my bracket, these are all folks now who like to sue, and for big bucks, with hotshot PI lawyers up from the City" (7, emphasis added). This new litigiousness7 takes the place, in the late twentieth century, of the early republic's impassioned political discussion. The Vineland County locals are no less "busy" and "disputatious" than the citizenry that greeted Rip Van Winkle, but while that citizenry had fought and won a war for independence (and so cultivated an immediate interest in politics), the loggers that Zoyd meets, "sipping kiwi mimosas" and clad in "three-figure-price-tag jeans by Mine. Gris" (5, 6), are interested only in maintaining the feverish materialism of the 1980s. 

"Both Rip and Zoyd, then, wind up at drinking establishments, but even before entering both men experience a dislocation akin to finding themselves in foreign countries. [...] For Zoyd, the dislocation is ironic and metaphorical. The first of "several rude updates" he encounters at the Log Jam is the "collection of upscale machinery parked in the lot, itself newly blacktopped" (5). In response to Buster's claim that he and his clientele are " just country fellas," Zoyd says, "From the looks of your parking lot, the country must be Germany" (7). This metaphor ironically and humorously introduces what will become one of the novel's key themes, the movement in the United States in recent years away from democracy and toward dictatorship. Thus Pynchon's novel updates Irving's story, which marked the transition from monarchy to democracy. 

[...] 

"In Irving's story, Rip's identity crisis is a synechdochic reproduction of the early republic's crisis of political identity. The question of Federal or Democrat, first foregrounded by Rip's arrival at the polling place on Election Day, is quickly overwhelmed by Rip's pledged allegiance to King George, reminding us of the more fundamental shift from monarchy to democracy. In Vineland, the shift in the political paradigm is similarly fundamental. Although Zoyd's moment of identity crisis occurs in a flashback to 1970 or '71, the zeitgeist to which the flashback refers sets up an implicit contrast between the mid- sixties and 1984, when he arrives at the Log Jam. 

continued . . .

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030716/7eca6bca/attachment.html>