Why Hawaii?

[Michael Joseph]

> >
> > This is a Pynchon novel. It
> > > ain't credible. Moreover, it ain't meaningful. What does it mean? What's
> > > meaningful about it?
> > >
> > Lot of stuff. In the meditation upon whether history governs or
> > imagination trumps history, for example. Take Zoyd's masturbatory fantasy
> > for example (handjobs, self-administered or otherwise being one of the
> > novel's minor topoi). In Zoyd's fantasy, imagination governs. The
> > separation between Frenesi and Zoyd disappears. He "registers it all."
> > However, he wakes up to discover Frenesi has left the hotel, and he
> > breaks down. Where is imaginative relief? History (as what actually
> > happens, material actuality) trumps imagination.
>

> More like,  Zoyd's relationship with Frenesi is reduced to a bland sex
> fantasy in which he  becomes a ghostly peeper who can only fine-tune the
> steam in the shower.

Wasn't it Benny Profane who gratefully recalls that Sarah Owlglass never
used the term 'relationship'? The thing is, Terrance, once you valorize
What actually happens over what one may imagine (arbitrarily privileging
one set of intentional acts over another), you hive off intentionality and
reduce fiction to the level of the memoir or commonplace books or or
worse, a second-rate historiography with unmet claims of objectivity.
Fine tuning the steam in the shower is a beautiful and compelling image.
Coincidentally, at a memorial service for an American historian Tuesday
(John Higham - I mentioned him in our first conversation), the historian
Carl Guarneri recalled sitting on a beach in Maine with Higham when the
fog rolled in on summer evening, and Higham, he claimed, said, as they
tried to follow the wispy silhouettes of the people who were wading in the
surf, that that was what they as historians were trying to do: see into
the fog.

> After flying half way round the world, getting
> zapped by those bluest of eyes, smoking a joint, this is all vile-minded
> Zoyd can come up with. And why? Because he's looking for Brock Vond. And
> superfuck isn't  there. And they (Frenesi & Brock) don't want any
> trouble.
>
> You want History?
>
> Zoyd is History. Like, see ya! Bye-Bye! Meet ya in the next world. And
> don't be late.
>
> He's out of here. It's time for her story.
>
> But why has P pounded this poor sap into the pavement?
>

Well you've been arguing that Vineland is all about work, so I'm surprised
you don't see that Zoy'd pounding is the story of Job.


Michael