VLVL "happy ending"? Collado-Rodrigueza (2)

[jbor]

The Aristotelian law is reenacted in this metaphorical interpretation of
life as a big computer where "electronic patterns of ones and zeros are like
patterns of human lives and deaths." Outside the systematic computer stands
God the categorical controller. The Borgesian metaphor is later repeated by
the narrator when it is following Prairie in her quest that this time takes
her to a computer library where she sees, "in storage, quiescent ones and
zeros scattered among millions of others, the two women [Frenesi and DL,
[...] in some definable space [....]" The notion that computerized
technology also constitutes a categorical threat will have to be dispelled
by Pynchon once more by means of a number of devices that again go from the
use of ironic and contrastive doubling to the continual trespassing of
narrative levels and the addition, this time, of an ironic new race of
people who live in-between two worlds, the Thanatoids.

If "waste" is a motif that has so far characterized the findings of some of
Pynchon's protagonists (Profane, Oedipa, Slothrop), in Vineland the author
offers the readers his interpretation of the American waste land in
dualistic terms. In his own Waste Land, Eliot chose to present
interpretations that came from both Eastern and Western cultures. Here
Pynchon ironizes with the new powers that, coming from both parts of the
planet, seem to exert a tight control of United States life: references to
Wayvone's western Mafia are counterbalanced with signs of the Yakuza in a
moment in which Northamerican paranoia has already become suspicious of the
tremendous economic power the Japanese were acquiring in the U.S. by the end
of the 1980s. But, in an excessive way, many more ironic dualities invade
the book's pages: Man is opposed by a new type of fighting woman, who can be
a treacherous exuberant spy, as Frenesi, or a deadly cyberpunk ninjette as
DL. When it comes to the repressive federal system, they also come from two
sides: on the one hand Federal Attorney Brock Vond, with a Rambo mood and
the prototypical characteristics of the evil powerful person who feels
himself above the law. On the other hand, crazy agent Hector Zuniga, a
contemporary Zorro who has become a television addict who wants to
impersonate actor Ricardo Montalban (to impersonate an impersonator!). Nor
will the reader miss one of the most pervasive dualities in Pynchon's
stories: 

"OK [Prairie says--my mom made movies for that Revolution you guys tried to
have, she was on the run, warrants out on her, FBI put her pictures in the
post office, Zoyd was her cover for a while, and then they had me ... and we
were a family until the feds found out where she was and she had to
disappear--go underground." There was a small defiant tremor in her voice.
Underground. Right. That's the story DL should have known they'd tell the
kid. Underground.

The old frontier between above and below reappears in Pynchon's story to
disappear immediately after. Frenesi's revolutionary background is only
fictitious; she did not have to go underground on account of her political
beliefs. The reason was totally different: she had to go underground because
she was forced to join the FBI as an informer, finally committing an act of
treason against her own friends. Was she immoral or only a victim? However,
if the frontiers that categorically divide day-light "above" from
underground "below" and good from evil dissolve in Frenesi's confusing moral
labyrinth, there are others (also old ones in Pynchon's fiction) to take its
place. The either/or principle also traps ninjette DL in the old modernist
dilemma which consumed Oedipa's brain:

Sometimes, waiting in her room, she'd wonder if this was all supposed to be
some penance, to sit, caught inside the image of one she'd loved, been
betrayed by, just sit.... Was it a koan she was meant to consider in depth,
or was she finally lost in a great edge-to-edge delusion, having only read
about Frenesi Gates once in some dentist's waiting room or standing in line
at the checkout, whereupon something had just snapped and she'd gone on to
make up the whole thing?

To escape the law that traps us in a dualistic understanding of life Pynchon
resorts to his favored technique of confusing ontological boundaries. As I
have already pointed out, the suggestion that everything could be nothing
but a dream offers the reader a new uncertain possibility of an apparent
happy ending, but Prairie's quest for knowledge is in itself an adventure
where ontological limits are never clear. She has to interpret documents,
photos, and footage to sort out clues in a way that resembles Oedipa's
search for the Tristero or Stencil's quest for V. We are trapped again in
human subjectivity and in its projections of an invented reality. Outside
the human brain the situation has become, by the end of the 1980s in the US,
a bit more problematic. As Baudrillard suggested, the mass media have
already effected one more displacement from reality. Newspapers, photos,
television, or film (the "traces" Prairie has to resort to in her search)
have combined in order to impose on us an extra barrier to ever reach the
real. The United States is infested by television sets that are never
switched off, a notion Pynchon also used in The Crying of Lot 49, and that
he radicalizes with the creation of his Thanatoids. The new Eliotean
living-dead or "Straw Men" who share with Zuniga a fatal drive towards the
TV set: no wonder "the Tube" is a term written in capital letters all
through the novel. DL helps the reader know a bit more about these peculiar
individuals who live in-between the limits of life and death:

    "What's a Thanatoid. OK, it's actually short for 'Thanatoid
personality.'  'Thanatoid' means 'like death, only different."'
    "Do you understand this?" Takeshi asked DL.
    "Near as I can tell, they all live together, in Thanatoid apartment
buildings, or Thanatoid houses in Thanatoid villages. Housing's modular and
pretty underfurnished, they don't own many stereos, paintings, carpets,
furniture, knickknacks, crockery, flatware, none o' that, 'cause why bother,
that about right, OB?"

     Pynchon's ironic narrator is kind enough to extend this definition in
his own words by adding that while "waiting for the data necessary to pursue
their needs and aims among the still-living Thanatoids spent at least part
of every waking hour with an eye on the Tube." Entropy as technological
addiction has been installed in the Pynchonian pages, replacing the old
hippies' use of cannabis. Eventually only the coming together of the
Traverses and Beckers, representatives of the different waves of left-wing
thinking in twentieth-century America, will bring some life to a nearby
Thanatoid village whose inhabitants "actually slept the night before" and
were therefore able to wake up. After coming back to life, the Thanatoids
abandon their indeterminate ontological position but a new logical
transgression awaits the ultimate evil character Brock Vond. He is made to
disappear in an Amerindian country of death, where the frontiers between the
factual and the fantastic become blurred again. What is the reader to expect
in the last page of the book? Reality or dream? If the latter, is there any
hope left for the US?

[...]

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