VLVL The picnic
jbor
jbor at bigpond.com
Tue Apr 27 16:51:26 CDT 2004
This emphasis on the Traverses and Beckers being loggers (as well as being a
motley bunch in other respects), coincides with an accumulation of
references to "the green free America" which has been lost. We are told that
it was once a part of Zoyd's and Mucho's childhood (314); on the next page
the infant Prairie is conversing with the trees, "as if this were a return
for her to a world behind the world she had known all along" (315, recycling
one of his _Lot 49_ conceits), and this image is immediately followed by a
description of the onset of a storm, and the approach of "dead trees on slow
log trucks" (315). Prairie's mystical communion with the redwoods is similar
also to the way the indigenous peoples apparently once related to their
natural environment (317). The accounts of Frenesi's childhood explorations
of the forests and waterways of Vineland (316, 305: NB that "she stopped
coming [to the Becker-Traverse gatherings] after high school") preempt
Prairie's foray into the woods in the final pages. Just like her mother
Prairie is trying to escape from the reunion and from her family.
best
>> 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).
>
> Cf. also that earlier job list when Zoyd first arrives in Vineland: the
> Traverses and Beckers are "spool tenders, zooglers, water bucks, and bull
> punchers" (320).
>
> spool tender: operates the lines and winches on a logging skid (or barge)
>
> zoogler: assists in loading logging sleds
>
> water bucks: packs water, either for a logging crew or for a donkey engine
>
> bull puncher: (or bull whacker, bull skinner) prods and drives the oxen (or
> donkey engine) hauling the logs on skid roads through the forest
>
> http://home.att.net/~lassen.logger/terms.htm
>
> NB also how in Vineland "the massed and breathing redwoods" were "alive
> forever" in the days before white men came and desecrated these "territories
> of the spirit" which the Native Americans once knew (317).
>
>> 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.
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