FW: VLVL "happy ending"? Collado-Rodriguez

[jbor]

(Did try and post this back during the recent Vineland read, but apparently
it never got through, so I am breaking it into 2 posts this time around
seeing as there seems to be renewed interest in discussing that novel.)

----------
From: jbor <jbor at bigpond.com>
Date: Wed, 02 Jun 2004 08:03:05 +1000
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Subject: Re: VLVL "happy ending"?

And, from one of the better available on-line essays on Pynchon's work
(despite the misspelling of Foppl's name -- I do love the author's
subversion of the conception of "law" here):

http://tarlton.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/collado24.htm

TRESPASSING LIMITS: PYNCHON'S IRONY AND THE LAW OF THE EXCLUDED MIDDLE

by FRANCISCO COLLADO-RODRIGUEZA

[...]
Is there any hope left? The quest for the lost paradise will take us to the
pages of Vineland, the third escaping "v" that, this time, comes informed by
new postmodernist theories of the simulacrum.
     Published on the verge of the new decade of the 1990s, Pynchon's fourth
novel was neither a critical nor a public success. Perhaps the old 
drifter had been too clear in his political views, perhaps his attack on
American politics was, this time, too overt and many people discovered that
he was not simply a formal experimentalist. At first sight, the new novel
seems to be too Manichaean, with Ronald Reagan and the FBI as the "baddies"
in a social context in which drug consumers and ex-hippies seem to be the
"goodies." What was the author complaining about? The answer to this
question was being written since his early short stories: it is not just the
System or They. With Vineland the novelist is still criticizing the
unfulfilled American Dream, the voyage from Europe to New England, from
there to California, always looking west for a political refuge against
human madness. Vineland, the good, legendary place discovered by the
Vikings, is nothing but a dream, a country of plenitude where the grapes of
God have again become the grapes of wrath. Steinbeck's social warning is
reinscribed fifty years later by the postmodernist Pynchon in a novel that
starts with the end of Zoyd Wheeler's dream, and that comes to an apparent
closed ending with Prairie waking up from another dream. In Zoyd's case,
blue jays are stomping around in his house's roof; in Prairie's, she sees
her dog with his face full of blue-jay feathers. What has happened to the
birds? Is the end the beginning? Is Pynchon back to the old mythic structure
of the full circle or is he predicting the end of dreams?
     "Dream" is a basic key-word to approach Pynchon's texts because it
offers a link to an alternative reality: it is a second ontological level
whose limits with daylight reality are systematically blurred. Stencil
"impersonated" and dreamed in V., Oedipa ended up thinking that she might be
projecting her own reality, and Gravity's Rainbow started with the
celebrated scream in Pirate Prentice's dream. Sensorial reality has always
been escaping from Pynchon's descriptions of his fictional universe, and his
fourth novel is no exception in his attempt to subvert the notion of a
clear-cut substantial reality that can be evaluated in categorical terms.
Vineland is a quest with protagonists always on the move, but it is a quest
that recaptures a notion that the reader already found in the writer's first
novel. The aim is the reencounter with a mother, and Stencil's obsession
with the lady V. is now transmuted into Prairie's attempt to locate her
ex-hippie mother Frenesi Gates. At the time of publication of the book,
personal computers were already a commodity. People like William Gibson or
Bruce Sterling had already revised postmodernist writing (including
Pynchon's fiction) and created cyberpunk, and Jean Baudrillard had become a
well-known cultural critic with his theory of the simulacra. It is no wonder
then that Prairie's quest takes the form of the simulacrum, with a
continuous use of parodic Derridean traces that appear as old documents,
pictures, film footage that the young protagonist will try to use to find
her mother. The girl's knowledge of Frenesi is always limited to her images,
to written or pictorial references, till their final reencounter. But,
according to the ironic narrator, there is a moment of convergence between
the two female characters, a link that seems to confirm their belief in a
new interpretation of the world affected by categorical thinking. Being an
old FBI informer, Frenesi tries to cash one of the checks she still receives
from the federal agency, and at that moment she imagines what human life is:

We are digits in God's computer, ... [and the only thing we're good for, to
be dead or to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we
contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice
of the hacker we call God.

[cont.]