VLVL Berger: the deal

[jbor]

It's interesting that Berger's essay relies on a misreading of Pynchon's
novel to make one of its key points. The requirement of Zoyd's welfare deal
is simply that he "did something publicly crazy" once a year (3) -- there's
nothing in the text to support the contention that it's a "government funded
program designed to keep the memory of the 60s alive as a memory of
insanity". This isn't the purpose of the deal at all. There's no indication
that it's a "program"; the arrangement is "just a way for us to know where
you are", as Hector tells Zoyd (304). So it's Zoyd who chooses to dress up
in makeup and women's clothing and jump through windows -- and he takes
great pride in the effects he is able to create -- so he's the one who is
relying on and perpetuating the "insane hippie" image in order to keep those
disability cheques flowing in every month. He could as easily put on a
different disguise: a business suit, a police uniform, whatever; there's no
stipulation which says what he has to wear, or what image he must project.
He's free to fulfil his side of the contract however he decides. Note that
once Zoyd has signed up for the deal and just before he lets him out of the
gaol Hector advises him to get a haircut (303), and that Zoyd does adopt a
conservative disguise later on when it suits him to (357).

In terms of the point Berger is attempting to make, it's another example of
how the 60s generation sold out on itself.

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[...]
In Vineland's first sentence, Zoyd Wheeler (Frenesi's ex-husband, father of
their daughter, Prairie) wakes up in the summer of 1984, and prepares for an
odd ritual. Each year, in order to receive his mental disability check, Zoyd
must commit some public act that testifies to his insanity. A hippie,
pot-smoking, small time rock and roll playing, long haired freak of the 60s,
Zoyd is a picturesque character; he is very 60s. In fact, Zoyd is part of a
government funded program designed to keep the memory of the 60s alive as a
memory of insanity, and the opening scene of the novel is a comic conflation
of representations of the 60s in the age of Reagan: A hippie wearing a
dress, wielding a chain saw, performing a self- and property-destroying act
which is broadcast live on television.

One of the greatest threats of the 60s, according to the Right, was its
blurring of gender divisions. The hippie was already feminized by his long
hair and lack of aggressivity (although at the same time he was --
inexplicably -- appealing to many women). Zoyd's dress heightens the gender
confusion but, through its absurdity, disarms it. This hippie, in his
ridiculous K-Mart dress, can be no threat to traditional masculinity -- he's
just crazy. But with his chain saw, the 60s representative is also a
physical danger. He's Charles Manson, the hippie as Satanic mass killer. And
with the reintroduction of a physical threat, the sexual threat also returns
as Zoyd, now armed as well as cross-dressed, enters the loggers' bar.
The figure of Zoyd at the Log Jam brings together parodies of feminism, gay
activism, and senseless 80s violence all as progeny of the old 60s hippie.
And this is precisely the Reaganist view of the 60s: a source of political
and especially sexual violence and chaos. As this opening scene of Vineland
suggests, Reaganism had (and the New Right continues to have) an overriding
interest in subsidizing and perpetuating the memory of the 60s in these
terms. And so the 60s enter the 80s in Vineland as the Reaganist 80s would
want to see them, as an aging hippie wearing a dress hurtling through a
window for the local news.
[...]

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html

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