VLVL chpt. 7, 93-97 errata

[Michael Joseph]

Well, nobody's perfect.

jbor points out a serious error. Gelsomina marries "a college professor
from L.A., of a good family with whom Ralph had done complaint-free and
even honorable business" (93), not Dominic, the monster movie-line
producer, who is Wayvone middle child (elder to Gelsomina, junior to Ralph
Jr.: note, 3 children).

Consequently, I have to withdraw my assertion that VL is paralleling
Gelsomina's marriage with that of Fred. Fellini and Giuletta Massina,
although the correspondences between La Strada and Vineland are not
entirely bootless, to be provisionally retained.

Zampano, the strongman, behaves contemptuously toward Gelsomina, yet his
macho veneer hides a desperate, childish, need, even a tormented
recognition. The arrogant strongman sees himself reflected in her weakness
and meekness, and he wishes to both savagely possess and destroy the
likeness; Gelsomina feels, reciprocally, that she belongs to Zampano.
They are "co-dependents," just like Brock Vond and Frenesi.

Additionally, Gelsomina plays a drum, and at the close of this chapter
Isaiah offers to teach Prairie to play drums, if she'll stay with him. Her
refusal, her decision to ride with D.L. Chastain, instead, constrasts with
Gelsomina's inability to choose.

The Fool, the "third" party in the Zampano/Gelsomina/Other minuet, also
works as an acrobat; Zoyd's auto-defenestration might be construed as an
acrobatic routine. The resemblance is sharpened in that, like the Fool,
who does his wire act in a clown's costume, well, you see where this is
going.

The traveling circus for which Gelsomina and Zampano work plainly
resembles the roadshow of Billy and the Vomitones, and, broadly
considered, suggests life on the run, against which the myth of paradise,
of home, consolidates itself.

Here is Alex Scott's final gloss on the film's theme:

"The film shows how innocence can be destroyed by a corrupt society. The
ending of the film shows that society must inevitably face significant
consequences for its oppression and mistreatment of the innocent, the
poor, and the powerless."

Although VL doesn't conclude tragically, like La Strada, it does at some
level embrace the same tragic vision. One might suggest that, just as
Romeo and Juliet may be considered a comedy with a tragic ending, VL is a
tragedy with a comic ending. The inevitable death of the comic fool, Zoyd
(and his anticipatory echo, Atman), is prevented by authorial
intervention.

http://www.angelfire.com/md2/timewarp/fellini.html

Moving "monster movie" outside of the Gelsomina Wayvone union all but
eliminates the probability that Vl was offering beauty and the beast as a
paradigm for Gelsomina/Zampano and Brock/Frenesi (and thus surrenders the
reference to the Psyche imagery of Pale Fire), too bad, but, I think,
conversely, it actually helps to build the case that by introducing La
Strada, VL desires to make us think about the dynamics of three,
specifically Brock/Frenesi/Zoyd and Brock/Frenesi/Atman (though others
also, Flash/Frenesi/Zoyd, RC/Moonpie/Zoyd, Zoyd/Frenesi/Prairie,
D.L./Takeshi/Prairie, Zoyd/Prairie/Sasha), how couples are threatened,
disequilibriated, destroyed, or, oppositely, strengthened, stirred or
reconciled with the introduction of a third. While our discussions of VL
have concerned oppositions and pairs, VL also invites us to consider
the archetype of three. (See, for example, Erich Neumann, The Great
Mother)

                        ----             ----

P. Chevalier points out that Deleuze and Guattari apparently did write an
Italian Wedding Fake book, however it has yet to be published in English.
Some references to it in Pynchon's text (not as an independent
publication) follow below:

     Fortunately [for musician Billy Barf, playing at an Italian Mafia
wedding without knowing any Italian songs] Ralph Wayvone's library
happened to include a copy of the indispensible Italian Wedding Fake
Book, by Deleuze & Guattari.

While they weren't authors of books that help chart-reading musicians
fake their way through songs that they don't know -- though the idea is
pretty amusing, given their occasional attempts to imitate or "fake"
schizophrenic writing -- Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were the
authors of a series of books about capitalism and schizophrenia, most
notably Anti-Oedipus, published in 1972 with a preface by Michel Foucault
about the book's relevance to fighting contemporary fascism. In a passage
that applies to them as well as it applies to Wilhelm Reich, author of
The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Deleuze & Guattari write, "Reich is at
his profoundest as a thinker when he refuses to accept ignorance or
illusion on the part of the masses as an explanation of fascism, and
demands an explanation that will take their desires into account: no, the
masses were not innocent dupes; at a certain point under a certain set of
conditions, they wanted fascism, and it is this perversion of the desire
of the masses that needs to be accounted for."

("Raptor, Rapist, Rapture: The Dark Joys of Social Control in Thomas
Pynchon's Vineland" by Bill Not Bored, originally published in the May
1990 issue of Art Paper. Substantially revised September 2002.
http://www.notbored.org/vineland.html)

                             - - - - - - -

"Deleuze and Guattari are named in Vineland at the wedding of Mafioso
Ralph Wayvone's daughter as authors of The Italian Wedding Fake Book, to
which Billy Barf and Vomitones (disguised as Gino Baglione and the
Paisans)  resort when it becomes clear that they do not know any
appropriate songs for an Italian wedding. They are only mentioned once,
without elaboration, and it may be only another Pynchonesque throwaway,
but if we follow the logic from Sister Rochelle's "Let her be" to
Heidegger, the Beatles, and the Rolling Stones, the reference to Deleuze
and Guattari extends the Vineland's exploration of how to contend with the
"Cosmic Fascist" which has contaminated sex, politics, and
representation."

(salon.com/books/int/1999/05/19/stephenson/print.html   Deep code    Neal
Stephenson talks about the history of secrecy, the role of equations in
art and the glory of open-source software. By Andrew Leonard
http://members.lycos.nl/vadercats/miscs-n-logs/pynchon.htm)

                              - - - - -

     "The narrative fragmentation of _Vineland_ is precisely
     into paranoia in the old Greek sense, ramified by
     schizophrenia in a defiant new sense.  It is worth noting,
     in this regard, that the musical tome of favorite Italian
     songs, used in desperation by Billy Barf and the Vomitones,
     an alternative rock band dressed in "glossy black short
     synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of
     Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches,"
     to provide entertainment for a Godfather-like celebration at
     the estate of one Ralph Wavony, is none other than the
     _Italian Wedding Fake Book_ by Deleuze and Guattari, authors
     of _Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ and _A
     Thousand Plateaus_.  The image of shattering glass becomes
     the structural, or is it *poststructural*, device of the
     novel as a whole.  As in schizophrenic discourse, image
     metonymically transforms the logic of the plot into a spiral
     nebula of fragments, a look into any one of which reveals a
     monadic world itself about to fracture, as if the book were
     a person thinking beside himself, deranged,
     deterritorialized, splitting into multiple selves."

Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez's _Mile Zero_ and
Thomas Pynchon's _Vineland_," by Daniel R. White, copyright (c) 1991 by
Daniel R. White, all rights reserved; published in _Postmodern Culture_
v.2 n.1 (September, 1991), available from PMC-LIST at NCSUVM or
PMC-LIST at NCSUVM.CC.NCSU.EDU]
http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.991/white-2.991

                               - - - - - -


One can also link these (un)mappings to Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari's vision, via Bernhard Riemann, in A Thousand Plateaus (a work
Pynchon refers to in Vineland as "An Italian Wedding Fake Book,"
parodically, but not altogether off-target, given its deliberately Baroque
structure) [is this accurate, P. Chevalier?].  Pynchon's most recent
novel, Mason & Dixon, might well more properly represent this type of
vision, both in philosophical-geometrical and cultural-political terms. It
was land-surveying that lay at the origin of non-Euclidean geometry, which
eventually led to Einstein's space-time.  Karl Friedrich Gauss, the first
mathematician to discover non-Euclidean geometry (and a near contemporary
of Mason and Dixon), was also a surveyor, and he developed some of his key
ideas while analyzing the geometry and cartography of land surveying. Some
of these ideas may also be traced to the invention of differential
calculus by Newton and Leibniz, both invoked by Pynchon in Mason & Dixon.
12 It is not possible to trace here all these trajectories or draw all
these maps; they constitute, predictably, yet another immense network or
network of networks.

Assembling Postmodernism: Experience, Meaning, and the Space In-Between
by Paula E. Geyh

                                - - - - -


If the Italian Wedding Fake Book is actual as P. Chevalier notes, then my
interpretation of VL's purpose for its inclusion is somewhat bloodied, but
unbowed. In appropriating D&G's fake book as a musician's fake-book, VL
asserts the prerogatives of literature over history, or, in terms of what
is real, the claims of the imagination over actuality. (Paul N, I wish
you'd share your ideas about history and VL. The sample you provided was
exquisite.) Perhaps, if we are allowed to conjecture about traidic
structures in Vineland, VL marks the implied third point in the fake book
triangle.

So, again, thanks to Jbor and to P. Chevalier;

With apologies to the Pynchon list for these and other errors,


Michael