VLVL: chapt 7, p. 92 real and fake

[Michael Joseph]

For clear precis of chapter plot see archive:

From: "Meg Larson" <mgl@[omitted]>
To: "Pynchlist" <pynchon-l@[omitted]>
Subject: VLVL (4)--Chapter 7 Summary
Date: Fri, 6 Nov 1998 10:57:48 -0500
---

Setting: The Wayvone Estate south of San Francisco "occupying a dozen
hillsides" in Mediterranean Revival style (popular in San Francisco,
1920-1940s).

A nostalgic imitation of Renaissance palazzo, the Med. R.  style seems
Pynchon's tongue-in-cheek gesture at his own Vineland trope. Foregrounds
notions of "real" and "fake": MR style imitated a style which was itself
invented as a facade by wealthy Italian business men during the late
medieval, early Renaissance. (See Charles Burroughs, Jacob Burckhardt;

link--http://www.marcheworldwide.org/html/renaissance1.asp?lingua=en

Ralph Wayvone himself extends VL's ratting out of the real/fake dialectic.
He lives like a prince, and yet is only a "wholly-owned subsidiary," (93)
a cut-out for some corporation [the mob? the church?]; yet, the Wayvones
are naively described as "like the Royal family." (ibid). He is surely a
powerful man, yet VL describes him as someone who "would impress strangers
as the kind of executive whose idea of power is a secretary on her knees
under his desk" (92)--a strange image logically of powerlessness, or
p'haps of power inferred from powerlessness. His pool resembles
(impersonates) a reservoir, and Ralph Sr. is at first glance a simulacrum
of the "white marble statues" [Roman gods? the Medicis?] placed around the
pool (for decoration? as exemplary models?)

Ralph and his MR house are pure fakes/yet/reactualize in the historical
moment they occupy that which they are an apparent falsification of.

VL syntactically recreates the trope of real<REAL>fake in the
baroque description of the Wayvone estate.

"The house, dating from the 1920s, was in Mediterranean Revival style,
presenting to the street a face of single-story modesty while behind it
and down the hill for eight levels sprawled a giant villa of smooth white
stucco, with round-topped windows and red tile roofs, a belvedere a couple
of verandas, gardens and courtyards, a hillside full of fig and olive
trees, apricot, peach, and plum, bougainviillea, mimosa, periwinkle, and,
everywhere today, in honor of the bride, pale plantations of jasmine,
spilling like bridal lace, which would keep telling nose-tales of paradise
all night, long after the last guests had been driven home" (92).

In its aspiration toward mimetically invoking the very sumptuousness of
the estate through a piling on of clauses and nouns, VL seems to claim the
"fakery" of the MR style and Ralph Wayvone is of the order of a creative
mimesis,  a claim that might extend to all of the pop cultural references
throughout VL.

Note that "pale plantations of jasmine" are redolent of paradise [sidebar:
VL's "nose-tales" anticipate Learned Dog's "nasal inquiries" in MD].
Consdier reference to road "El Camino Real miraculously silent"
[Gelsomina in La Strada (the Road) is all but mute] and Ralph Sr's
"microvacation on an island of time" which is "fragile and precious as any
Tahiti or one of them" (92).

Tahiti is paradise, of course, known through Gauguin and RL Stevenson. It
is also French Polynesia, a chain of islands spread over four million
kilometers in the eastern South Pacific. Perhaps VL's repetition of the
plural Tahiti signifies both the plurality of islands constituting the
geographical Tahiti and the plurality of representations constituting
Tahiti in art and literature; and perhaps the plurality of representations
of the type of paradisiacal tropical island.

The mirrorplay that slices through the "fake" dichotomy of real and fake
(Barf and Baloney), which may remind us, some of us, of Pale Fire, but
with a strikingly different point to make, extends to incidental
duplications, e.g. "Brooks Brothers" (92) and, of course Ralph Sr's son,
Ralph Jr. Of course, as we have repeatedly noted, there are also
mirrorings of previous passages of text, e.g. "platoons of children" (92),
"squadron of blue jays" (3), "El Camino Real" (92), "Phantom Ridge Road"
(35), and Gelsomina's wedding (92) Zoyd and Frenesi's (38). VL intends for
us to make these connections, to see them as being, in some sense, the
same thing, as metaphorically conjoined. So, for example, in the passage
describing Zoyd and Frenesi's wedding:

"It would be easy to remember the day as a soft-focus shot, the kind to be
seen on 'sensitivity' greeting cards in another few years. Everything in
nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as it sounded
later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace--the
visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder ... all
must have been off on some other planet." (38)

The focus here upon a harmonious relationship of man and nature (such as
artistically rendered by the architects of renaissance palazzi and the
poets of pastorals and eclogues (i.e., poems about sheep)--[a reflection
within a reflection?]--is recollected in the more splendid descriptions of
Gelsomina's marriage and the Wayvone estate. Neither wedding is a fake--VL
both presents and deconstructs the notion of fake--but both reactualize a
natural order as ideally conceptualized.

Thus, beginning with the description of the Wayvone estate, chapter 7
imitates an epithalamium, one that looks backward toward its Renaissance
and perhaps Pre-Renaissance model, and reaffirms the marriage of Zoyd and
Frenesi--if not the fact, in principle: as a creative mimesis, a
valorizing imitation of nature. (And, in fact, we might even catch a
glimpse of VL's intentions in the elemental connotations of their names,
Zoyd=void=air; Frenesi=frenzy=fire (and, obv, Prairie=earth).



Michael