VLVL2 (1) Missed Communications: Beginnings

[Michael Joseph]

Paul, Thanks for your response, and for managing to fit Eliade into your
nicely nuanced engagement with _Vineland._ Your willingness and aptitude
for coordinating both an ideological and mythic reading of the text
strikes me as admirable and useful; I think the kind of "creative
hermeneutics" that potentiates Eliade's engagement with religious texts
naturally subverts hegemonic structures, so I'm inclined to be
enthusiastic about a reading that uses the theme of Return to interrogate
the entelechy of the state.


The mirror scene in the bathroom seems to anticipate the televisioning of
his act, which ironically confers exemplary status on it, since t.v. is
myth, but recalls as well _Alice Through the Looking Glass,_ a trope
Pynchon seems to have in mind, among other things, with his window
jumping. (It's likely that Bev Clarke made this point in her piece on
Carroll, Pynchon and Nabokov, cited by Vincent a few weeks back, though I
haven't seen it.) I think it also serves as something to be recalled, as
do many of the incidents and images in this beginning. Consider this scene
"where he shifted into the dress and with a small hairbrush tried to rat
what was  on his head and face into a snarl he hoped would register as
insane-looking enough for the mental-health folks" (4), beside this:
"While the other Vomitonettes were running aorund with hair color or
wings, all Prairie'd had to do tao look straight was brush hers.
'Perfect!' tactful Billy had told her, 'nobody'll look twice.'

"She stared into her reflection, at the face that haed always been half
amystery to her, despite photos of her mother that Zoyd and Sasha had show
her. It was easy too Zoyd in her face . . .." (98).

The correspondence between the two moments just blows me away.

To my mind, Pynchon is using the mirror as you say to "freeze" or
hypostasize the moment, the passage from, I would say, the transcendent to
the contingent, as a necessary, preliminary to fusing or telescoping two
disparate moments of the text, binding time, in a way that self-references
the trope of Return and reactualization. In the implication that T.V.
(movies, song, etc.) serves a similar function, of transcending the
contiguity and evanescence of time, and that, in this respect it fulfills
the mythic function of story telling, seems very pointedly Eliadean.

Maybe Terence would say there is even a suggestion of Pynchon in the
mirror . . . in ratting his hair . . . ? Or perhaps in making a face
(Eliot/author as face-maker) for the mental health folks? (us rational
guys)

Thanks Elaine (belatedly) for pointing out the Bigfoot reference, in which
Zoyd is presented as a mythic figure, unchanged by time. It's revealing to
note in this context that the conversation had been about the film *Return
of the Jedi* and that Buster is described in somewhat paradoxical terms as
someone whose life had been changed "forever" by the filming of the
*Rturn* but who "never changes."




Michael