VLVL2 (4) Off-stage

[jbor]

on 3/9/03 4:14 PM, Paul Nightingale at isread at btopenworld.com wrote:

> As a character, Prairie doesn't actually 'do' very much: she
> watches, and listens.

I disagree. One of the more interesting "current time" scenes in the novel
is when Prairie takes over the cooking and kitchen work at the retreat, and
how she actively uses the computer there to "summon" her mother's ghost. She
proves to be quite resourceful, something which many of the adults in the
novel aren't.

> A lot of time has been wasted (predictably) arguing over the meaning of
> the word "vet". What should be pretty obvious is, if Pynchon wanted to
> write a detailed back story for RC he would've done just that: consider
> the amount of information given over to Millard and Blodwen (46-48). By
> way of contrast, references thus far to Vietnam are somewhat coy

I don't think RC can be erased so easily from the text, and the
near-editorial reference to the Vietnam War and "murder as an instrument of
American politics" (38.18) in this chapter is not "coy" at all. As I
mentioned, the allusions to RC and Blood as Vietnam vets bookend this
narratorial interpolation. That you're ("predictably", I guess) not
interested in considering these details in Pynchon's text as thematically
significant is fair enough, but that doesn't mean they're not evident or not
worth discussing. The Millard/Blodwen comic cameo seems very slight by
comparison, even if it does get half a page more word-space in the novel.

I think that the way RC and Moonpie's back story is only presented in hints
and glimpses mirrors the actual circumstances of that back story, and what
Zoyd knows of their lives. They have actively erased their trail "since the
war", so their prior lives are a gaping hole in the text. And just like
Zoyd, perhaps, we do not know for sure *why* they've erased their trail,
only that they have, and it does, or should, or might, give us pause to
wonder, as it could also have given him pause to wonder (but we also know
that Zoyd tends to suppress this type of problematic information about
himself and his compadres, or that he *tries* to suppress it at least).
Despite the circumstances of their first meeting and the mystery surrounding
their past, "RC" and "Moonpie" and their kids have become a part of Zoyd's
and Prairie's circle of close friends, and a major reason for that is the
fact that they and Zoyd are able to do business together, and that they
share with him an attitude towards enterprise and remuneration which isn't
entirely "legitimate".

best

> So much of what we find out subsequently is what Prairie either sees
> (watching old footage from the 60s) or is told: the narrative is,
> increasingly, filtered through her consciousness. One of the key
> structuring moments in the novel, repeated often to tug the narrative
> back to the nominal present, is her sudden reappearance in the text,
> serving to remind the reader that she is an audience for the story being
> told. As a character, Prairie doesn't actually 'do' very much: she
> watches, and listens. In fact, from this point on (ie the end of Ch4),
> not an awful lot of anything happens, if by that we mean 'happens now'
> as opposed to 'happened then, being told now'. Compared to the rest of
> the novel, some 300+ pages, there's a lot of action in Ch4.
> 
> Hence, the reader reads Prairie reading. The breakfast scene (40)
> recalls both Ch1 and Ch2, and at the heart of it is her reading of
> Zoyd's 'confession': "What mattered at the moment was that he knew how
> to visit Frenesi ... and that could only mean he must feel a need for
> her as intense as Prairie's own." Prairie goes looking for the mother
> she has never known, just as Zoyd yearns for the wife he never had; but
> where he wants to rewrite the past, effectively erase it, she'll uncover
> countless histories, both personal and political.
> 
> A lot of time has been wasted (predictably) arguing over the meaning of
> the word "vet". What should be pretty obvious is, if Pynchon wanted to
> write a detailed back story for RC he would've done just that: consider
> the amount of information given over to Millard and Blodwen (46-48). By
> way of contrast, references thus far to Vietnam are somewhat coy; that
> is, the narrator is coy when referring to History. So the novel, it
> seems, is asking the question, how to represent History?
> 
> Subsequently, the novel is rather less coy, once History has been
> exposed as a text. At which point Official History can be challenged by
> a subversive history-from-below, subversive because it insists on the
> power of memory: Hub watching the Hollywood film on TV (ie not a
> TV-movie), raging against the "scabs" and "fascist fucks" whose names
> appear in the credits (82). That of course is Frenesi's flashback in one
> of her few appearances in the novel: she remembers Hub remembering.
>