VLVL2 (1): Television (part 1)

[Michael Joseph]

Tim,

Thanks for reproducing the essay. Here are responses I've pulled out of
the back of my thumb.

> 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)
>
Where is such a "realm"?

> 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.

Blurry. Are there distinctions or are there not? Are the characters
indistinguishable from TV characters?

 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.

What is "the televisual world of Vineland?" Is it Vineland within a
televisual frame of reference, is it the portrayal of television and the
way characters relate to it?

> 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.

"tubal vines" (source?) "Transcendence from text to social reality" is
unclear; does the author mean that Pynchon's writing in general (or
Vineland in particular) is free of ideological or sociological
signification?

> 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."
>
A flat reading for sure. While Vineland doesn't univocally "applaud" or
"parody the televisual," it certainly does both - and why "instead"? Are
cultural "artefacts" not applauding and parodied?


> 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).

Perhaps not the place to mention it, but the commercials in Vineland serve
a distinctly different purpose to the television shows; this critic's
conflation of commerical and show unfortunately misses this point.

> The characters are
> essentially artefacts of televisual culture.

Ridiculous over-reading. Zoyd and Prairie are literary creations who as
characters are shown to be conditioned by television, not constructed by
it. The founding authority accorded to television over emphasizes its
importance at the expense of other conditioning agents, e.g. cars, food,
movies, music, sex, etc.


> 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).
>
But, far from representing a fusion of television and social realities,
these excerpts seem to exemplify the very parodic structure the critic
claims to be missing, albeit one which is more nuanced and less quid pro
quo. The literal and figurative are obvious to the reader, and obvious
to the characters, even though they are dynamic and interpenetrating
realities. For the kind of erasure the critic appears to have in mind, the
subjectivity of the characters would have to disappear, and it never does.


 > continued . . .
>
>