VLVL2 (1) TV Narrative

[Tim Strzechowski]

> Television is frequently mentioned in VL commentaries, but I've not seen
> anything that offers a serious (ie detailed) analysis. Possibly the most
> interesting brief summary comes from Madsen's chapter on VL in
> Postmodernist Allegories:  [snip lots of good stuff]
>

Paul, this is excellent!

I also found the following by Joseph W. Slade in his essay "Communication,
Group Therapy, and Perception in _Vineland_" (_The Vineland Papers_, pp.
68-88), which addresses Zoyd's characterization, drugs as motif, WORK, and
the Tube:

"At first, drugs, like mystic visions, seem an obvious alternative to
official communication channels.  At his daughter's birth, Zoyd Wheeler
drops acid "on the chance of glimpsing something cosmic that might tell him
he wouldn't die" (285).  Zoyd is vulnerable to government control because he
is a known doper, but as much as anyone else in the novel he retains his
integrity, though he has to pay for it with the buffoonery that
institutionalizes his role of schlemiel, a posture of survival in a
rationalized world.  Besides, his essential worth has nothing to do with
narcotics, and everything to do with his capacity to love.  When, looking at
his sick daughter, Zoyd realizes that he "would, would have to, do anything
to keep this dear small life from harm," he experiences "his belated moment
of welcome to the planet Earth" (321).  Because there are few drug
revelations, narcotics function in the novel mostly as the symbolic baggage
of the outlaw, badges of difference in an establishment dominated by
yuppies, non-smokers, Republicans, and other control fetishists.  Marijuana
growers chant Tibetan tunes that "operationally" join northern California
and "other U.S. pot-growing areas [... with] the third world" (49), that
world -- in Pynchonian parlance -- being still less subject to corporate
control.  These and other references to drugs serve one other purpose: they
set up two jokes.

"The first is that the corporate establishment, attracted by the enormous
profits of an underground drug economy, has not only become involved in the
traffic but actually controls it, a notion that exfoliates into a vision of
George Bush as drug Kingpin (353-54).  The second joke is that the real
narcotic in _Vineland_ is television.  The principal addict is federal drug
agent Hector Zuniga, who commits himself to a Tubal detoxification facility,
where he subverts therapy by bribing attendants to smuggle in sets or by
periodically excaping.  His manic efforts to shoot what he calls a movie --
but which Frenesi dismisses as a television cop show (345) -- full of
antidrug messages are the funniest sequences in the novel.   (Vineland
Papers, p. 78)

Are there other ways in which the Tube functions as a "narcotic" in the
novel?