Blue in Vineland

[Dave Monroe]

The Color Blue in Vineland
>From an excellent article by Jonathan Rosenbaum (1990)

The key images that organize the narration are mainly emotional and
associative rather than strictly analytical, which means they often
carry a great deal of ambiguity. Chief among these is Frenesi's blue
eyes, which are mentioned at least a dozen times over the novel's 385
pages; the fact that Prairie has blue eyes as well only adds to our
uncertainty about what blue eyes and the color blue can suggest, from
predatory cops to the clearest of skies. Other linked images are birds
and airborne predators like drug-bust helicopters that remind us of
Brock Vond; a Japanese gumshoe, Takeshi Fumimota, and a female ninja
named DL Chastain who was once Frenesi's best friend and is now
Prairie's chief guru-characters whose romance and movements often seem
to parallel Vond's and Frenesi's (with an implied rhyme scheme
involving trajectories up and down California and Japan and across the
Pacific in both directions); at least five electrical storms that
shake up the atmosphere with apocalyptic portent; and various other
totems ranging from figs and cucumbers to TV screens and shopping
malls.

There is also the significance of Prairie and Zoyd's dog, Desmond, and
the crucial way he links up with some of these other images. After an
epigram from one Johnny Copeland ("Every dog has its day, / and a good
dog / just might have two days"), the novel opens with Zoyd being
woken up in his home in the fictional northern California town of
Vineland — a haven and retreat for lost hippie tribes-"by a squadron
of blue jays stomping around on the roof" — blue jays that are
scavengers, stealing all the food from Desmond's dish. At the book's
end, some 380 pages later, after Brock and his federal scavengers have
confiscated the Wheeler home in the midst of a Bush-style drug raid,
sending both Zoyd and Prairie into hiding, Prairie, who has returned
to Vineland for a family reunion and slept that night in the woods, is
woken by the tongue of Desmond, whose face is "full of blue jay
feathers."

Desmond's "second day," in other words, suggests both a fresh
beginning and a renewed continuity; the closest Pynchon comes to
giving this a metaphysical dimension is in a passage from Emerson
quoted by Prairie's great-grandfather at a climactic family reunion:
"Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed,
of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the
tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their
shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator
to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or
be pulverized by the recoil." Whether Desmond's secret retribution
against the blue jays is individually willed or part of some larger
process is a moot point, but it is implied, at least, that Prairie,
unlike Pynchon's earlier searchers, has arrived at a place where she
can act. The movement between the blue jays as predators and the blue
jays as victims is the distance she has traveled in her own education.

Between these two points, the blue eyes of Frenesi and Prairie are
repeatedly evoked by other items and images: Brock's "hard, blued
body" and his "sky-blue suit"; "pale blue" drug-bust planes, Prairie's
blue overalls, Superman, blue haze, TV screens, contact lenses,
spaces, shadows, and dwelling units; a lake, a river, the Pacific, and
even such things as baby blues, an automotive bluebook, and a 12-bar
blues. Beautiful and impenetrable, Frenesi's blue eyes are not so much
a mystery that can finally be solved as a site to be considered and
contemplated.

http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=Blue_in_Vineland

Reading: Pynchon's Prayer

http://www.jonathanrosenbaum.com/?p=7460

Blue:
The History of a Color
Michel Pastoureau

http://press.princeton.edu/titles/7116.html

Cf. ...

"'Some Lapis ...?'" (M&D, Ch. 71, p. 689)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69698