VLVL Prairie and DL

[Michael Joseph]

On Fri, 17 Oct 2003, Ghetta Life wrote:

>
> >From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
> >"whatever story she tells this kid must not, maybe could never, be the
> >story she knew." (101.1-2)
>
> Is "the story she knew" the truth?  Not in a Pynchon novel.  The fact
> that DL knows this makes her a very special character, almost more than
> human.  She doesn't exactly evade Prarie's question, at least not in the
> sense of wanting to keep her from the truth.  Rather she allows Prarie a
> means of discovering "the truth" about her mother from multiple sources
> and over an extended period of time.  And in some sense Prarie knows
> this is what DL is doing.  It's almost as if Prairie is being initiated
> into the secrets of the sisterhood, a process which takes time and has
> to be personally experienced.
>
> Ghetta

I very much support your insight into Prairie and DL collaboratively
initiating Prairie into "the secrets of the sisterhood." But I want to
speak to your point about "truth" as being subjective. It is subjective,
but it's not, too.

Eliade reminds us that although the truth is subjective, when we are
struck with the truth it is of the nature of an objective reality, a
universal that is being perceived from a necessary, non-arbitrary
perspective. We think we are seeing an existential condition, something
real and not dependent upon the viewer. In analyzing truth in Vineland, we
should start from your position, with an awareness of its phenomenological
basis--the idea that truth is relativistic or aspectival or subjective, a
la William James:

"What we say about reality then depends on the perspective into which we
throw it. The *that* of it is its own' but the *what* depends on the
*which;* and the which depends on *us*. Both the sensational and
relational parts of reality are dumb: They say nothing about themselves.
We it is who have to speak for them." (WJ/Pragmatism (Cambridge: Harvard
UP, 1975) 118.

Just putting this back into context, we all read Frenesi, DL, etc.,
according to our own horizon of interests, background, and so forth, and
speak for our insights, and so, it will do no good for us to demand that
all who oppose our point of view desist and confess to being of a lowly
suborder of terrestrial life and their views like unto the bubbling of
swamp gas. We all have our reasons ... .

However, when we talk about a character expressing or (Yeats) embodying a
truth, we also should not allow the tenets of phenomenology to override a
phenomenological fact--the truth comes to us as a *that*--a revelation,
with the weighted certainty that our own sublunary and woebegone
subjective self has somehow made contact with something beyond the
shifting gooey slurry of its own profoundly confused existence. I want to
stress that in my reading, this is central to understanding the
philosophical core of Vineland.

It's my sense, this time around, that Vineland is asserting Truth as being
simultaneously capital T Transcendent, beyond criticism, universal, and,
also, small t, subjective, prone to error, a notch above opinion. The
illogic of this postulate is argued cunningly through a seemingly endless
series of movie and tv show references, which are both miserably banal and
yet have real "explanatory energy" at times for the characters who are
referencing them--a real meaning because they, the shows, universalize
experience, hence, they give it structure, resonance, even purpose, rather
than valorizing a particular perspective or allegiance. (All art functions
this way. Look how Vineland the text creeps into our other lives and gives
structure and resonance to other daily, tedious events.)

Through the device of the tv show/movie/car/food/music (even landscape
perhaps?), Vineland argues for the omnipresence of the fundamental human
need/trait of meaning-making: Humans make meaning out of everything and
anything, Tosca and Hawaii 5-0, alike, but regardless of the material, the
perception of truth makes it Truth.


Michael