VLVL2 (1): Television (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Continuing from "The New Historicist Creepers": 

Cultural Artefacts: A Televisual Guide to Vineland 

To a remarkable extent, Ronald Reagan continues to live within the movies; he has been shaped by them, draws much of his cold war rhetoric from them, and cannot or will not distinguish between them and an external reality. Indeed his political career has depended upon an ability to project himself and his audience into a realm in which there is no distinction between simulation and reality. (Greenblatt 6) 

Vineland, which appeared four years after Stephen Greenblatt delivered the lecture quoted above, certainly portrays such a realm. The distinctions between aesthetic and social reality are difficult to discern in a novel whose terms and characters are essentially the same as the televisual medium it is examining. In the article "Marxism and the New Historicism, " Catherine Gallagher warns against viewing critical practice as merely "a politics in disguise" (Gallagher 38). Certainly this warning could also be applied to the televisual world of Vineland. The search for a reality behind the "tubal vines" of the novel requires a transcendence from text to social reality that Pynchon's writing seems to consistently discourage. Vineland does not seem to provide an avenue for a directly mimetic passage from text to reality, unless one intends to read all mention of popular culture in the text as essentially parodic. The text neither applauds nor parodies the televisual but presents it instead as "cultural artefact." 

References to television shows occur as early as page 9: "cop vehicles . . . playing the Jeopardy theme on their sirens," and recur throughout the text. "Van Meter flashed Mr Spock's hand salute" (11); "It was like being on Wheel of Fortune" (12); and so on. The characters constantly allude to the culture of television, even mentioning "production values" (15, 82), and use its structures as metaphors for their situation: "Only a couple more commercials just hold on Prair"(105). The characters are essentially artefacts of televisual culture. The text breaks down any distinction between a literal social reality and a figurative televisual one, thereby eliminating the possibility of a parodic structure. This breakdown is established early in the novel when Zoyd attempts to vandalize the "Log Jam Bar," an annual "act of craziness" necessary to claim his mental disability pension. On arriving at the bar, he finds it slightly more upmarket than he remembered. Buster, the owner, gives him the following explanation: 

"[W]e're no longer as low rent as people remember us here either Zoyd, in fact since George Lucas and all his crew came and went there's been a real change of consciousness. . . ." They were talking about "Return of the Jedi" (1983), parts of which had been filmed in the area and in Buster's view had changed life there forever. (Vineland 7) 

Zoyd subsequently discovers that his life is also inextricably linked to the televisual. He no longer has a choice about what kind of "crazy act" he commits; he must jump through the window the media specifies, in this case the "Cucumber Lounge." Another instance of this confusion is found in Zoyd's friend and business associate Millard Hobbs. Millard appears in commercials for a landscaping business called "The Marquis de Sod," but eventually televisual and legal ownership merge as one: "People out in the non-tubal world began mistaking him for the real owner, by then usually off on vacation someplace, and Millard, being an actor, started believing them" (46). 

continued . . .

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