VLVL2 (1) Missed Communications: Beginnings

[joeallonby]

on 7/17/03 9:53 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> 
>> 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.
> 
> 
I'll have another one Bob. Oh, and can I run a tab. I'll a little short but
I get paid on Thursday.


> 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