VLVL2 (Chapter 6) - part 6

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mike Weaver" <mikeweaver at gn.apc.org>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, September 22, 2003 9:20 PM
Subject: VLVL2 (Chapter 6) - part 6


>
> 78.29-31 - Ramon Raquello... Mars -  referring to Orson Welles infamous
> broadcast of 1938. See:
> http://www.irdp.co.uk/hoax.htm (Burhan)
>

"(...) the radio show the world remembers best occurred on October 30, 1938.
The War of the Worlds stirred a public panic that today would be the envy of
modern media marketing."
http://www.bway.net/~nipper/page4.html

"All of Pynchon's fiction presents to us a War of the Worlds. The evocation
of H.G. Wells' famous science fiction novel is intentional, for it is
helpful to think of Pynchon's work as science fiction raised to art by the
power of genius. But  we should not loose sight of the fact that is fiction
is fantastic, and that the basic narrative energy in his novels derives from
the clash between this world and what I will abbreviate as The Other
Kingdom -- between our world of logic and rationality and the five senses
and a nightmare world that has begun to penetrate and threaten it. (...)
Pynchon's one story is really as simple and magical as a fairytale, and the
core of his fiction is always fantastic and always the same. (...) One
cannot oversimplify Pynchon's only story: it is the oldest fairytale of
all."
(Douglas Fowler, A Reader's Guide to Gravity's Rainbow, Ann Arbor, Michigan,
1980, pp. 10-11)

It is obvious that Brock Vond is the exponent of this "Other Kingdom" in
"Vineland" -- the way he breaks into other people's lives, gains power over
them, puts them into concentration camps, turns them into snitches, molests
them, destroys their families. It is no coincidence that "The Return is of
the Yedi" is mentioned too in the novel, the part of the first Star Wars
trilogy (many fairytale elements in that too) where it becomes obvious that
Darth Vader is Luke's and Leia's father. Vond is modelled after Vader, but
contrary to the Lucas-movie he's not saved in the end.

Otto