VLVL2 (1) Missed Communications: Beginnings

[Terrance]

> That's a pretty cynical worldview that Pynchon is offering then, isn't it?
> But I suppose it would tie into the paranoid vision of Them that is pretty
> consistent in his works.  You hide, They seek, right?


I don't think P's  fiction is consistently cynical. 

But let's see if we can spin a little more Rip into this yarn. 

Does VL begin  with a parody of Irving's Rip? 

Suppose it does. 

I think Rip's combination of nostalgic humor and political satire,
forestalling what some critics claim Irving suffers from
(sentimentality, a label some critics have put on VL as well) may have
been attractive to Pynchon. 

I don't think Thoreen mentions the fact that P's first Rip tale is
Lowlands. 

In that story, Flanges wife tells him to go "over the  hill and far
away." 

Here is a link to Irving's tale: 

  http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~daniel/amlit/rvw/rvwtext.html

Now, after Rip gets away from his wife he does go into the
woods.  

"Poor Rip was at last reduced almost to despair; and
  his only alternative, to escape from the LABOR  of the
  farm and clamor of his wife, was to take gun in hand
  and stroll away into the woods." 

  AND 

  In a long ramble of the kind on a fine autumnal day,
  Rip had unconsciously scrambled to one of the
  highest parts of the Kaatskill mountains. He was after
  his favorite sport of squirrel shooting, and the still
  solitudes had echoed and reechoed with the reports of
  his gun. Panting and fatigued, he threw himself,
  late in the afternoon, on a green knoll, covered with
  mountain herbage, that crowned the brow of a
  precipice. From an opening between the trees he could
  overlook all the lower country for many a mile
  of rich woodland. 

  OK, now what does he see? 

  He saw at a distance the lordly Hudson, far, far below
  him, moving on its silent but
  majestic course, with the reflection of a purple
  cloud, or the sail of a lagging bark, here and there
  sleeping on its glassy bosom, and at last losing
  itself in the blue highlands. 

  Ah! Yes, the majestic, purple, the fading away of the
  MONARCHY into the blue. 

   And when Rip looks in the other direction he sees, 

  On the other side he looked down into a deep mountain
  glen, wild, lonely, and shagged, the bottom filled
  with fragments from the impending cliffs, and scarcely
  lighted by the reflected rays of the setting sun.

  American MOBility. 

  As he was about to descend, he heard a voice from a
  distance, hallooing, "Rip Van Winkle! Rip Van
  Winkle!" He looked round, but could see nothing but a
  crow winging its solitary flight across the
  mountain. He thought his fancy must have deceived him,
  and turned again to descend, when he heard
  the same cry ring through the still evening air; "Rip
  Van Winkle! Rip Van Winkle!"

  On nearer approach he was still more surprised at the
  singularity of the stranger's appearance. He was
  a short square-built old fellow, with thick bushy
  hair, and a grizzled beard. His dress was of the
  antique  Dutch fashion...Passing through the ravine, they came
  to a hollow, like a small amphitheater, surrounded by
  perpendicular precipices, over the brinks of which
  impending trees shot their branches, so that you only
  caught glimpses of the azure sky and the bright
  evening cloud. ...  heir visages, too, were peculiar:
  one had a large beard, broad face, and small piggish
  eyes: the   face of another seemed to consist entirely of nose,
  and was surmounted by a white sugar-loaf hat, set
  off with a little red cock's tail. They all had
  beards, of various shapes and colors. ... 

In P's Lowlands, Dennis figures to just go out and sleep
  in the Police Booth again, but the booth with the
  Mondrians won't do. His wife won't have anymore of his 
  surrogate rationalism. So, he won't do as she commands and 
  take a clean shirt and shaving gear (in
  other words, go get another place to live but keep
  going to WORK). He decides to grow a beard and hang with the boys for
a while. Not ready to have a child (is Zoyd ready?) or a home, he heads
out on
the road. 

Zoyd, like  Rip, is saved or reborn into a new age and is freed from sin
(his sin being his loss of virginity to Hector and BV &Co.). 

While the Reagan 80s tries to cast Zoyd as a long haired feminine
failure, a clown under
control and disabled by Capitalism's cozy check in the mail, Zoyd has
a new social function in the Pynchon 80s. Like Rip, his function is to
wake up and live a life denied him in the past. A good dog sleeping in
the shade of the tube light wakes up to a life of trees and a daughter,
and a family ...  and to sacred time and space--a home. 

His life is constantly threatened by media that turns lived experiences
into
pornography. 


Rip becomes a favorite among the "rising generation." 

He embraces and is embraced by the American preterit.  


But for this matter (contrast with Zoyd as tube cult hero to young
american men), Time (which threatens to make Rip little more than an old
man out of time and make Zoyd a TV image) must function as a process of
social Integration.


 What makes this Integration through Time possible in both novels, is
 fantasy (hope for the **possibility** of ... ). 


In both stories we are drawn into a realm of peace, refuge, unity, love. 


In Rip's America and in  Vineland the Good there is "something strange
and incomprehensible about the **unknown** that inspires awe."

  

Rip, like Zoyd and Dennis (Lowlands)  personifies the capriciousness of
youth and freedom from rationality, logic, society (is the allusion to
Shakespeare's  Henry Plays only an attempt by TRP to make the SL stories
literal? I doubt it).  

These guys are perpetually out of time, out of place, out of smokes, so
on. Why? 

They are trying to mediate old world values and new world values. 


We can smell Fitzgerald's distant fire works in Vineland the Good and
many critics traced the descriptions of the spilled and broken world on
the West coast to the coast of Long Island Sound. 

Rip,  Dennis, Zoyd, Lardass,  Nick...have a common problem, a conflict
of loyalties. 

It's a theme Tom Pynchon had to deal with. And for Zoyd, Dennis, Rip,
Nick, it is a "wife"  that prevents them from living in two worlds at
once. 

Eliade Time & Cause and effect dear Frenesi. 

Rip's wife will not permit him to take solace, comfort in the company of
indolent sages in the Shade.   


The tradition of masculine American intellectual individualism requires
the company of men, thoughtful men. American men need to talk with
American men to feel sane. 

You think Melville took to talking high German metaphysics with a man on
the brink of madness because he was a writer? 


 Sanity requires communication, but how does one communicate with a
wife, or a society, after the total loss of self, the loss of identity,
of one's pals, one's friends, one's men. 


OH ODYSSEUS! 


How can one get HOME? 

Slothrop, a Dorothy, never will. 

Zoyd will. Rip will. And  home is a sacred space in sacred time. Yes,
America on the mend. 

And  zoyd, like wicks, is a commentary on the american artist. zoyd
being a slothful musician and not quite a writer, but compare him with
hector as   film maker and the other film/tv/media people in the
book--his ex-wife and company and his daughter's boy friend ... 

Ever read  Mr. melville's poem about rip van winkle and the lilac?

http://www.hunterfoundation.org/ripvanw.htm