Re Zapping Irony in expensive clothes

[Terrance]

TV pervades not only the represented world of VL, but also the
linguistic level of the text; it "mediates" the lives of the characters
not only only in the sense that they compulsively consume TV, fantasize
about it, model their behavior and expectations on it, and so on, but
also in the sense that the reader's access to these characters' lives is
by way of a verbal medium itself saturated with TV. Least problematic
are the idioms actually spoken by characters which are based on or
derived from TV viewing. Many appear to be original with Pynchon, though
he passes them off as familiar idiomatic expressions. Such idioms serve
to reflect and confirm the deep penetration of TV into characters'
everyday behavior and sense of themselves and others. For example:

Only a couple more commercials, just hold on. 

[...]

More problematic are the figurative expressions, some of them elaborate
conceits in the style of GR and CL49, occurring outside the characters'
direct speech. Presumably these TV-based figures reflect the presence of
TV models in the characters' consciousness, and we ought to attribute
them to the characters themselves, even though some for or other of
"combined" (free indirect) discourse in which the characters' voices and
the narrator's mingle: 

"It was like being on wheel of fortune ... out of control." VL.12-13

Our "natural" inclination would probably be to attribute such metaphors
to the characters JUST BECAUSE they draw on TV material, as though it
were impermissible to think of the novel's narrator as a TV-viewer in
whose own "voice" TV conceits might occur. By this interpretation, the
narrator necessarily maintains an ironic distance from his TV-obesessed
characters and their TV-saturated language. Such an interpretation rests
on a subtle form of high-culture snobbism, and in any case is undermined
by the president of the GR narrator, whose own discourse is
promiscuously open to all the discourses of the text's world, high and
low, technical and colloquial, poetic and obscene, hackneyed and exotic.
So we may may well be forced to concede, against our inclinations to
read ironically, that the VL narrator's "natural" idiom is as
TV-saturated as that of his characters. 


McHale, Brian Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge, NY 1992

Excuse me while I sharpen my nails
And just who are you this time?
You look rather tired
(Who drinks from your shoe)
Are you pretending to love
Well I hear that it pays well
How do your pistol and your Bible and your
Sleeping pills go,
Are you still jumping out of windows in expensive clothes?