VLVL2 (1): Television (part 2)

[Tim Strzechowski]

continuing . . . 

To a greater or lesser degree all the characters of Vineland are subsumed in this televisual solution. One of the novel's more extreme examples is Hector Zuniga, the Drug Enforcement agent. Ironically, Hector is himself an addict. Although not addicted to any substance, Hector abuses television and receives treatment from N.E.V.E.R., a "tubal detoxification" unit. Among Hector's excesses are the constant quoting and humming of television shows and theme songs, having a television set in the back seat angled at the rearview mirror, and divorcing his wife because she refused to treat the television set as a member of the family. Hector is far from a passive viewer; his ultimate plan is to turn his life of drug enforcement into a movie, thereby making it more real. In the last chapter of Vineland Hector hunts down Frenesi Gates, intending that she play the lead role in his film "Drugs - Sacrament of the Sixties - Evil of the Eighties." She points out how deluded Hector is, but in so doing implicates the entire American viewing public in his neurosis. 

 [...] 

Given the picture of reality the text presents it is not surprising that critics of Vineland have had difficulty in cultivating a critical perspective. The difficulty lies in the novel's use of mass culture in both its structure and content, a fact that leaves academic analysis oscillating between outright rejection and attempts at justification. As Mark Miller points out in his book Boxed In, most academic attitudes toward televisual culture tend to dismiss it altogether, attack it vehemently from a leftist perspective, or else justify it from the postmodernist perspective of "play." In Vineland Pynchon seems to be toying with each of these attitudes but in the end comes down on the side of none. The irony here is that any comment the novel makes on television already stems from a televisual perspective. This in turn nullifies the critical reading that seeks to impose a "foreign" theoretical apparatus, whether it be leftist or deconstructive, on the text. 

The only critical avenue the text leaves open is evident in the Foucauldian structures examined earlier. Analysis necessarily begins from a position within the social framework of the text and works genealogically backwards, without the prospect of coming to know its own present, let alone projecting such knowledge onto the future. Ironically, those characters in the text who lived through the sixties are the ones who are totally subsumed in the televisual. The younger characters, who have grown up with TV culture, offer a different and more positive vision of the land of vines that is televisual America. The character of Isaiah serves such a purpose in the novel. The name Isaiah 2:4 given him by his hippie parents (because of the passage's prophecy of peace) takes on an ironic slant in that he is trying to borrow money from Zoyd to set up a violence amusement park. However, Pynchon makes more than one use of the biblical intertext. Isaiah 2:4 has grown up with the culture of television and seems to understand it better than those whose lives it has taken over. The biblical Isaiah condemned the Israelites for idolatry: 

2:7 His land is full of silver and gold and treasures beyond counting; his land is full of horses and chariots without number; his land is full of idols. . . . They bow down before the work of their hands before the thing their fingers have made. 

In a similar vein Isaiah 2:4 remonstrates with Zoyd's generation: 

"Whole problem 'th you folks generation," Isaiah opined "nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it - but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th' Indians sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars . . . it was too cheap." (Vineland 373) 

continued . . .

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