VLVL2 (4) Off-stage

[Michael Joseph]

Paul,

I am in agreement with two of your main points - that Prairie serves as
the reader or pre-reader of Vineland (a naive reader, which is perhaps a
topos Pynchon parodies in MD with Pitt and Pliny), and that the text is
ultimately philosophical and concerned with history (both its
representation and I think its toleration), and I am profoundly grateful
to you for expressing them. I suspect one has to explore the question of
what role the imaginative plays in the construction of any form of history
here (and consider how Pynchon balances history/empirical against human
creativity, inasmuch as this meditation assumes the form of a novel and so
at some fairly high order of magnitude si concerned with how to write a
novel), and to say more clearly what one means by history.

Thanks.

Michael




On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Paul Nightingale wrote:
> >
>
> 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.
>
>
>