Vineland

[jbor]

>> N.B. "reminding him that unless *he did* something publicly crazy ...
>> he
>> would no longer qualify for benefits."

on 5/9/04 12:25 AM, Mark Wright wrote:
 
> Making Zoyd perform public acts of craziness and televising them seeems
> like a perfectly good way for the Feds to assure that Zoyd and his ilk
> continues to be discredited in the mind of a less-than-thoughtful wider
> community. He is made assume the position of village idiot. Who would
> give credence to the ideas or recollections of the village idiot?

No doubt about it, and there's certainly that element of complicity or
compliance involved. The media lap it up, and the negative stereotype Zoyd
enacts benefits the conservative Establishment, as I mentioned in a
subsequent post. But it's worth noting that Zoyd chooses the form his act of
madness will take, and that Pynchon has him being "reminded" in the novel's
very first paragraph that it's a volitional act on his part ("he did") which
is required for those monthly disability cheques of his to keep rolling in.
He's a paid circus clown, though he doesn't realise it. He's quite proud of
his performances too (until he finds out from Isaiah that his friends have
been substituting sugar glass and are in cahoots with the media).

best

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

> 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.