VLVL2 (1): Television (part 3)

[Tim Strzechowski]

continuing . . . 

Isaiah 2:4 locates the source of televisual culture in the sixties, the generation that should have been most vehemently opposed to it, but because of a lack of "understanding" allowed it to take over their lives. As Joseph Slade points out, "what happened to the Rocket in Gravity's Rainbow happens to television in Vineland, an instrument for change becomes an instrument for the status quo" (128). Miller also criticizes the sixties for offering no "heroic deviation from our culture's movement towards T.V." (8), pointing out that T.V. and its advertising structures were actually antecedent to, and thus complicit in the sixties: 

That "youth culture," first of all, was an indirect derivative of the "youth market" encouraged in the Fifties, when the young acquired a nascent group identity from T.V. and its eager advertisers. Furthermore, the "counterculture" was dependent on the mass media - contrary to the Luddite and/or pastoral mythology of the era. The familiar symbols and catchphrases of the young gained currency through films, through radio and television through albums and concerts deftly engineered. And television left its traces even on the high ground of counterculture ideology. (Miller 9) 

The sixties counterculture (if it can be prefixed "counter") failed to realize that by using the resources of the mass media establishment it would eventually be subsumed in its structures. The quintessence of this attitude is the 24fps film collective who believed the medium they were using had little to do with the message they purported to spread. It is this attitude of "innocence" that is genealogically linked to a 1984 in which social and aesthetic reality cannot be discerned from the medium; a situation that is portentously alluded to when Frenesi "inscribed in the viewfinder a TV-screen shape so you could frame a shot for the evening news." 

The Televisual Solution 

Isaiah 2:4 and Prairie are natives of a televisual world. Unlike the sixties leftovers of the novel, televisual reference falls from their lips with all the nonchalance of a proverb or a curse. At the family picnic Sasha tries to get Prairie to sing the theme from Gilligan' s Island as she did as a baby; Prairie refuses in a gesture that perfectly bespeaks the relevance of the televisual in her life, suggesting both infantility and inanity. Although Isaiah and Prairie remain constructed by their televisual environment, it is still an act of critical presumption to read the close of the novel in the tradition of the fall of the American dream. Elaine Safer reads the ending of Vineland in such a way: "The primary tone at the novel's close is that of a fallen world. The novel begins with blue jays bothering the dog Desmond and ends with their demise" (122). That Desmond has eaten the Blue Jays need not be read in this derogatory sense. In the text's opening the Blue Jays seem to represent uncertainty, and for Zoyd they are portentous of the destruction of the family and its home. As mentioned earlier they also represent the imperfection of communication into which deconstruction has delved. That Vineland concludes with Desmond eating the Blue Jays and "thinking he was home" suggests neither apocalypse nor certainty, only the simple dream of a shared reality, a shared homeland, a shared perception, significance, and history. 

The televisual word of Vineland is that of a naive, shared reality. By placing us within the realm of convincing "cultural artefacts," it precludes any critical comment upon them; at the same time it situates new historicist critical practice in the same time slot. Vineland offers a version of the sixties and traces various contemporary elements of society back to that time, illustrated by Isaiah's claim that television's hegemony originated in the sixties' counterculture; however, it cannot offer any concrete knowledge or prescriptives for the present. As a result, notions of recuperation or fall remain somewhere behind the novel's flickering surface. 



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