VLVL concluding chapter 7

[Michael Joseph]

Prairie accepts DL's invitation (the H50 theme), telling DL "I'll have to
trust you" (103), to which DL replies "You'll have to trust yourself. If
it feels too weird don't 's all" (103). (Prairie implies the situation
puts her momentarily under DL's care, and DL's response suggests she
desires and expects Prairie to be strong and independent.)

Meeting Isaiah and Meathook (who is snorting cocaine, and thus will soon
ask with a kind of lazy intrusive confidence whether DL sings), Prairie
directly explains her intentions for going away. Instantly deflated,
Isaiah references the promise he made to Zoyd (perhaps asserting a kind of
paternalistic claim), and shows suspicion of DL, but Prairie defends
herself and DL: "She's cool, rilly" (104). Meathook's question galvanizes
DL to do her "Just a floo-zy with-an U-U-Uzi" routine.

Self-styled Babies of Wackiness, John Diebold and Michael Goodwin
interpret DL's song as a split-screen contrast between DL and Frenesi: ".
. . Frenesi, who was born in 1946, can be seen as a personification of
postwar America -- the America that gives in and votes for Nixon and
Reagan, the America that lets itself get fucked. DL provides a clear
alternative: Instead of falling in love with the symbol of authority, she
becomes it: a floozy with an Uzi."

http://www.mindspring.com/~shadow88/intro.htm

But, the chaste "virgin huntress" (D & G) is not a floozy, and neither is
the weapon hers (nor does she ride in Mercedes Benzes, loll about in
Jacuzzis ... ), so as an introduction to her character, the song leaves
something to be desired. In fact, apart from suggesting her strength and
independence, it seems wildly out of character--and yet, it does contain
one curious connection. In a chapter that posits an idealized wedding
(temporarily silting off concerns with Wayvone patriarchalism), it
anticipates something of Takeshi's later reflections upon his wedding:
"Takeshi grew instantly paranoid, assuming, for some reason, that the
young man was talking about his ex-wife, the film actress Michiko Yomama
[backhanded ref. to Michiko Kakutani, perhaps another kind of girlie with
a gun?] currently starring as a light-comical obstetrician in the
television series "Babies of Wackiness," a Japanese import currently and
inexplicably blowing away all its U.S. ratings competition. If there was
any connection between **that homicidal hooker** in the Haru no Depaato
["I will not go in Spring"? song reference to Camelot, yet one more
Paradise?] and Michiko, with her fragile smiles and gifts of
disappearance, Takeshi couldn't see it They'd been married, as a matter of
fact during a classical sixties acid trip, in which it became beyond clear
to them both that in some other world they had been well acquainted."
(159) My sense is that VL is connecting weddings because they are all
mythically the same wedding, or reactualizations of the same archetype.
The point of concatenating tokens like this is to reinforce a perception
of Vineland the Good--the final chapter--as yet another reactualization of
Paradise, albeit a "double-coded" Paradise, inasmuch as he both means it
to be Paradise and to mock it. Floozy with an Uzi also braids together
opposites: floozy/uzi; model/nun;  sex/death; play/fight. Fact, one might
wonder whether the song itself is meant to be understood as an opposite to
DL--DL as seen in the mirror, in reverse. We should also interpret Floozy
with an Uzi as a marker of DL's ability to impress and secure good opinion
of herself.  That "Ralph loved it" suggests she could have performed it
particularly for his benefit, the benefit of her powerful host and a
potential ally against Brock Vond.

"DL tossed the weapon back to the bewildered gunsel" (105)

To add to John Carvill and Mark Wright's learned discussion, here is the
OED online defintion: (I am including bells and whistles in view of their
express interest in the term, and in case others do not have access to
OED)

Gunsel :U.S. slang.

Also gonsil, gunshel, gun(t)zel. [ad. Yiddish genzel, f. G. gnslein
gosling, little goose.]
1. A (nave) youth; a tramp's young companion, male lover; a homosexual
youth.

1914 JACKSON & HELLYER Vocab. Criminal Slang 40 Gunshel, current amongst
yeggs chiefly. A boy; a youth; a neophyte of trampdom. 1923 N. ANDERSON
Hobo vii. 101 Gonsil, youth not yet adopted by jocker. 1927 Amer. Speech
II. 387/2 Men can be observed traveling with boys... The boy has many
names,{em}punk, gazooney, guntzel and bronc. Punk, guntzel and gazooney
are also used to refer to any sort of green lad. 1929 D. HAMMETT in Black
Mask Nov. 43/1 Keep that gunsel away from me while you're making up your
mind. 1931 G. IRWIN Amer. Tramp & Underworld Slang 88 Gonsil, a young
tramp, not yet taken in hand and bent to his will by an older man. A boy.
A passive male homosexual, usually a youth or younger man. Also gunsel.
1946 MENCKEN Amer. Lang. xi. 582 The tramp..carries a boy with him, to
rustle food for him and serve him otherwise..the boy is a punk,..guntzel.
Ibid. 584 Gonov, which means a thief to thieves, means a fool on the
carnival lot, and the same meaning is given to guntzel, which means, in
the jungles, the boy companion of a tramp.

    2. [as if f. GUN n.] An informer, a criminal, a gunman.

1950 H. E. GOLDIN Dict. Amer. Underworld Lingo 89/1 Gunzel,..(by
extension) an informer, a weasel, an unscrupulous person. 1951 New Yorker
3 Mar. 26/3 Scores of hoodlums, gunsels, informers. 1959 G. FISHER
Hospitality for Murder xix. 151 Bruce thought he'd never make a reliable
gunsel. 1964 W. MARKFIELD To Early Grave (1965) vi. 109 After all, didn't
Ben Gurion himself hand her a blank cheque, she should have what to hire a
couple gunsels? 1965 J. WAINWRIGHT Web of Silence 34 The voice said:
..This is a gun{em}and it's silenced. Okay?..I tried to work out what sort
of a voice the gunsel had.

DL's car, as many of the cars in Vineland seems fetishistic. Perhaps a
play on Freud's auto-eroticism. Certainly a demonstration of Vineland's
ampleness, its fullness. (Remember Vineland the good was named for its
grapes.)

When Prairie says goodbye to Isaiah, he says, cryptically, "Only a couple
more commericals, just hold on, Prair" (105).

Commercials are just bad--unlike TV shows, which have a number of positive
values in _Vineland._ (Their use as exemplary models to lend a kind of
transpersonal meaning to otherwise evanescent and unrepeatable actions, to
emphasize intersubjectivity, to lend texture, whether pathos or comedy, to
imply message--which as Tim pointed out may be received or missed--all
seem to me to trump arguments that Vineland is wholly antagonistic to
"tubal culture," or Pynchon is here decrying it, as a prophet in the
wilderness.)

"Commercial" here indicates something evil but one hopes minor. In every
instance (check it out) commercials are associated with or represent
catastrophe, in some form. See instances of use on p. 158 (doubt,
anxiety), 161(sorrow-connect to "Babies of Wackiness"), 185 (idiocy), 191
(anxiety), 212 (death/destruction).

Isaiah's use of "Prair" for Prairie points to another connotation of
Prairie's name, associating it with prayer. We see the connection made
elliptically later, in the placement of "prayer" and child-- "The question
rang almost prayerfully in these surroundings, the moonlit
childhood-picture-book clouds out the rounded toy windows, the lambent
fall of electric light on faces and documents, the affectless music in the
earphones, the possibly otherworldly origins of Takeshi's madness. . . ."
(159) (Ellipses in text.) Taken as a whole, the text seems to posit
Prairie in some senses as liminal teen and in others as child, or as an
innocent requiring protection--from the wretched evil of Brock Vond, from
the truth about her mother--which is to say, in a deeper sense, the truth
about herself.

Vineland is inarguably preoccupied with children and childhood. One cannot
really analyze this strand here, or begin to do it justice in a 7 minute
gourmet summary, but for those inclined, here are some concatenated
references to child/children/childhood: p. 105, 149, 159, 164, 169, 180,
223, 232, 239, 244, 250, 256, 259, 260, 262, 269, 277, 290, 298, 340-1,
351, 362, 371, 383.

"DL allowed the youngsters another beat . . . " (105). Echoes
Author-as-drummer trope on p. 97 ("Actually, I'm a percussion person . .
.").

". . . and then hit the ignition" (105) Car as musical instrument.
" . . . producing a menacing yet musical exhaust that sent Isaiah Two Four
into head-clutching ecstasy" (105) Car as sacred musical instrument, a
vehicle of transcendence.

Here, and in the chapter's final complex sentence, Vineland seems to
emphasize DL's car as a means of attaining transcendence (turning time and
motion into music)--an extension of DL's powers of transformation (her car
is after all a Trans-Am; and, inasmuch as the Babies of Wackiness have
implied the mythological connection already, one recalls Diana changing
Actaeon into a stag; she also somehow transforms Takeshi, who is
originally described as looking like Moe (Moe Howard of the comedy trio,
the Three Stooges) but finally as Robert Redford); The final description
is a very motorheaded trope and one that deftly prefigures the Sisterhood
of Kunoichi Attentives in the next chapter.

For Paul and others working on the landscape of Vineland, wldd appreciate
insights, thoughts, observations about the topological significance of
heights, and movement up and down. After the exemplary
epithelamium, and the girl-bonding, the novel takes us down from
the heights and into the "freeway traffice **far** below" (106)

Thanks.


Michael