VL: the Deal

[jbor]

In the flashback to when he was first busted, Zoyd recognises that Hector is
just doing Brock's "shitwork" and that the marijuana obelisk has been the
doing of Brock and his "ex-old lady": and he even accuses Hector of "working
for the two o' them" (294-5).

In the current time of the novel it's again "Brock Vond and his army" who
have confiscated Zoyd's house (50-1); Hector's trying to get Zoyd to
co-operate in the anti-drug movie scheme he has cooked up, so's they'll
"both be rich forever off of this, man" (51). And at the end of the novel it
looks as if Hector has pulled off his movie deal (355), and his fortunes are
definitely on the up and up. By contrast, the Becker-Traverse gathering,
where Prairie is so disillusioned by the anticlimactic reunion with both her
parents (374-5) that she goes off into the woods by herself and cries out
for Brock to "come back" and "[t]ake me anyplace you want" (384), is
anything but a happy ending. It's no accident that Pynchon closes the
narrative in the midst of an ineffectual Wobbly-style picnic right at the
moment that Reagan is about to be elected for his second term.

best

on 4/9/04 2:26 PM, jbor wrote:

>> Vineland, p. 304:
>> [...] Right, which is where the mental disability
>> arrangement came in. "Just a way for us to know where
>> you are," Hector had explained, "long as you're
>> picking up the checks, nobody'll bother you--but if
>> you stop, even one time, the alarm goes off and we
>> know you're tryin' to skip."[...]
> 
> In fact, Hector is merely the messenger here, following orders in what he
> perceptively recognises is only an "estupidass marriage-counsellor errand"
> (295) anyway. And, as well as ensuring that Prairie is looked after when
> Zoyd is arrested (295), Hector finagles Zoyd's release from custody (302-3)
> and gives Zoyd some pretty sensible advice as well (303).
> 
> The deal had actually been orchestrated by Brock to keep Frenesi away from
> Prairie (294, 304-5). Frenesi, of course, is still sleeping with Brock at
> this point, as she had been (literally and symbolically) for some time. Her
> "steadfastly smiling" presence at the gaol when Zoyd is released (304), as
> well as the fact that the chapter opens with her goading Brock into a rage
> with the information that she has a child with Zoyd (294), intimates that
> she is the one who has manipulated this situation. Thus, this "arrangement"
> through which Zoyd and Prairie will be supported by the state is *her*
> legacy to the daughter she abandoned. The chapter ends with the information
> that, over the years as Zoyd and Prairie established themselves in Vineland,
> the "mental disability checks ... arrived faithfully as the moon" (321).
> 
> There is a deeper sub-text in all this too, of how the counterculture
> gradually succumbed, or was lured by fame and fortune, to the indignity of
> becoming a comic self-parody (or worse, N.B. that the reference to Tiny Tim
> and Wild Man Fischer is counterpoised by mention of Charles Manson 309) and
> how it lost any of the political puissance it might once have aspired to as
> a result -- how it allowed itself to become framed by the media and the
> Establishment as, what Zoyd is, some crazed and impotent transvestite hippie
> wielding a chainsaw, leaping through windows and scaring the kiddies.
> 
> best
>