VLVL2 (4) Off-stage

[Tim Strzechowski]

Which only goes to prove that we can examine _Vineland_ in light of numerous
other themes and ideas:

  1.  Responsibility (political, social, familial, etc.)
  2.  Family or Parent/Child Relationships
  3.  The role of women / maternal figures
  4.  How to interpret the Past
  5.  Communication / Missed Communication / How to Communicate
  6.  The role of Television on social consciousness
  7.  Reality vs. Illusion
  8.  The purposes / benefits of Violence
  9.  Innocence vs. Experience
10.  How to read / interpret text
11.  Pop Culture as a means of communication / interpretation
12.  Drugs (as addictives) and their relation to TV, pop culture, sex,
power, etc.

The list goes on and on . . .


Tim


>
> 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.
>