VLVL The picnic

[jbor]

I'm inclined to the view that the yearly Becker-Traverse gathering is a
parody of the way the IWW devolved into an ineffectual social organisation
after WWI, when its main achievement was holding an annual May Day worker's
picnic. I'm not sure that it's all that different, in terms of its
celebration of "family", from the Wayvone wedding either.

The Emerson quote Jess recites each year is indeed a nice one, but the fact
that in the very next breath he gloats about Crocker "Bud" Scantling being
killed in a head-on car smash does tend to take the edge off it a bit (369).
And it brings up the theme of revenge and retribution again. I think that
wishing for these "[s]ecret retributions" and leaving them to "divine
justice", bitching about your enemies and basking in their misfortunes,
hoping for some sort of "karmic adjustment" but not having the courage of
your convictions to actually do anything about it, isn't that far removed
from those Thanatoids, who "limit themselves ... only to emotions helpful in
setting right whatever was keeping them from advancing further into the
condition of death. Among these the most common by far was resentment,
constrained as Thanatoids were by history and by rules of imbalance and
restoration to feel little else beyond their needs for revenge." (171) I'd
say that this description (satire ... criticism) applies as much to Jess and
his kin as it does to the Thanatoids, and I don't think it's any accident
that Shade Creek is also in Vineland, or that the Beckers and Traverses
spend much of their time "talking back to the Tube" either (371).

Note also the people Prairie meets at the family get-together: all those
"[d]istantly related sleazoids and occasional megacreeps" who cheat at cards
and steal from the kitty (367); her uncle Pinky, "looking sinister in a
shapeless Ban-Lon leisure suit that might once long ago have been a brighter
shade of pea-green" (367); the way Sasha patronises her (367-8); the
unsatisfactory reunion with her mother ("like meeting a celebrity" 375); and
the way Zoyd virtually ignores her (370).

NB also how Zoyd and Flash at the picnic are "looking around fearfully, like
unarmed visitors in a jungle clearing" (369). The family members listening
to Jess's revenge sermon are described by Pynchon as follows: "choker
setters and choppers, dynamiters of fish, shingle weavers and street-corner
spellbinders, old and beaten at, young and brand-new" (369). I don't think
it's that glowing a family portrait at all -- they're cheats and shysters
and career-loggers, and recall that Jess's work was "trying to organize
loggers in Vineland, Humboldt and Del Norte" (75), so, quite ironically, and
deliberately so imo, there's a very real sense in which that redwood that
fell on him at the baseball match (75) was in fact one of these "[s]ecret
retributions" he preaches about.

I'd say that Prairie goes into the woods (NB, and NB the descriptions on
375, 377 and 384-5, and how it's "a piece of the woods that she'd never
seen" 375) simply to get away from them all (when he finally has time for
her she tells Zoyd that she's "[f]eeling totally familied out" 374 -- she's
only been there a couple of hours and she has just been reunited with her
dad. Not only that, she's only just met her mother for the very first time!)
I think that she returns to the woods after Brock's attempt to kidnap her
because this reunion with her family -- meeting up with her mother, the
culmination of her quest, and of the narrative -- hasn't been satisfactory
at all: "There should have been more." (384)

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