VLVL2 (4) Off-stage

[Michael Joseph]

Like the Vineland map, it lends itself to different readings in accordance
with the conceptual framing of the reader. It is probably also a useful
index to (not to say map of) one's own idiosyncracies (and, given a
communal reading, the idiosyncracies of a certain, self-selected sampling
of the reading public). I hope what I wrote also goes to prove that
Paul Nightingale's particular reading of (I'm paraphrasing) the contested
representation of history has resonance, and to elicit your intellectual
support for the proposition that _Vineland_ is also examinable in terms of
the dynamic reciprocity between imagination and history.

Michael

On Wed, 3 Sep 2003, Tim Strzechowski wrote:

> 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.
> >
>
>
>
>