VL-are we ready for some sort of wrap-up?

Wed Apr 22 14:22:27 CDT 2009

I'm calling it a wrap, strike the set.

On Apr 22, 2009, at 9:35 AM, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> This was my second reading of VL and I can honestly say that the  
> group read helped me appreciate the book a lot more than my first  
> solo attempt.  So thanks, everyone.

You're welcome, and I return my thanks to everybody as well.

For what it's worth, I'm past counting how many times I've read  
Vineland. The two books of Pynchon I've most obsessed over are  
Vineland and The Crying of Lot 49, and for pretty much the same  
reason. They describe places I've been, and in that description  these  
books transform those places. It's interesting how Frank McConnell  
points to Raymond Chandler in his review of Vineland [excerpts below],  
another writer with a gift for describing California. San Narsciso is  
a place I've been and Vineland is a place I've been.

I spent my summer in Watts in 1966. I'm not sure when I first read "A  
Journey into the Mind of Watts." But that image of the "Late, Late Show:

	In one corner was this old, busted, hollow TV set with a rabbit-
	ears antenna on top; inside where its picture tube should have
	been, gazing out with scorched wiring threaded like electronic
	ivy among its crevices and sockets, was a human skull. The
	name of the piece was "The Late, Late, Late Show."

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-watts.html

. . . is as good a takeaway as any from Watts, 1966, plenty of  
creative uses for destroyed objects in that place and time, very much  
a testimony to the power of the ghost of Simon Rodia. And similarly,  
Crying of Lot 49's San Narcisco reminds me of Ventura County back in  
1964/1966,  cleaner than L.A., still a bit of a farming region but  
clearly:

	. . . less an identifiable city than a grouping of concepts—
	census tracts, special purpose bond-issue districts, shopping
	nuclei, all overlaid with access roads to its own freeway.

. . . and as for the Transbay Terminal, just across the street from  
"Fun Terminal" as you enter San Francisco from the Berkeley side.,  
what can I say—he knows how to pick 'em. . .

Garberville and parts north, like Arcada, are pretty much as described  
in Vineland. Might seem like a limited perspective, but I have walked  
so many of those steps in those times—All around L.A. 1963/1968,  and  
centered in Berkeley but traveling all over Northern California  
1984/1999. I suspect I will have a very similar response to "Inherent  
Vice" and have no doubt that it will overlap with Vineland and "CoL49."

Vineland feels like the most personal of the novels, and the first  
where the characters are ". . .made luminous, undeniably authentic by  
having been found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more  
shared levels of the life we all lead. . ." Even Vato & Blood,  
tubalholics as much as Hector and clearly a set of rimshots off of  
Cheech & Chong—they still jump from the pages, all these characters  
have some wild hair up their ass that wasn't part of the scheduled and  
authorized programming they got from the Tube and K-12. Documenting  
that sort of innate tendency towards anarchy comes from long  
observation and good descriptive abilities. The characters may not be  
any more "real" or "round" than before but they are more rambunctious.  
Then again, Vineland is deliberately more antic that the previous  
books, more Mendelssohn than Bruckner.

> Although every Pynchon book is "about" many things and subject to  
> many interpretations and deconstructions (Heikki's latest e-mail  
> about V was very thought-provoking), it's hard to resist the  
> temptation to come up with some pat answer for someone who might  
> ask:  "Vineland?  What's it about?"

This is one of the best, and clearest, explanations I've read  
concerning what Vineland's "about:

	. . . Pynchon's point here is exactly that "the Movement" —
	remember when we all called it that? — was dead at the
	starting-gate, and was dead just because, secretly, it lusted
	after the same glittering prizes, the same gold cards, that the
	Establishment held. Socialism may not be shared poverty, but
	neither is true revolution simply reversed dominance. . .

http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=LA_Times_Review_-_Frank_McConnell

> I might attempt to answer by saying that it's an exploration of how  
> family and ideals and pop culture inform and distort each other.   
> The Traverse clan is caught in a tug of war between their political  
> heritage and the lure of the Tube, somehow managing to adapt both to  
> their family culture.  At the same time, pop culture takes on the  
> Traverse family and their politics and adapts them to an acceptable  
> form for popular consumption.

Funny, now it's "The Traverse Clan", kinda making Vineland a time- 
travelled prologue, "The Hobbit" to "Against the Day's" "Lord of the  
Ring." Very interesting. . .

> Personally, the DL/Takeshi sections were my least favorite, possibly  
> because they didn't fit in with my narrowed view of what the book  
> was "about."

And I just loved them, though I guess that the DL/Takeshi story is  
probably my favorite because it gets down to cases with karma, a  
central theme in Pynchon's writing from here on through "Against the  
Day." "Prairie Wheeler" = Prayer Wheel, as all of our hopes and  
prayers for the next generation and the generations to follow fall on  
the shoulders of that 14-year old girl. DL & Takeshi serve as both  
guides—kind of a psychopomp, or a journey back in time—for Prairie and  
provide examples of working out karma on a more extreme and  
exaggerated scale, often to comic effect. Than again, maybe it was  
Prairie's culinary choices at the Ninjette retreat that really won me  
over. In any case, Prairie's tale is all wound up with the tale of DL  
& Tasheki.

> I'd guess that each of us has a very different view of what this  
> book is about (Robin?).  Would love to hear them.
>
> Laura

Vineland's also "About" the extraordinary way in which Television  
seeped into our skins—"you're soaking in it!"—and  took over our  
consciousness. I would cite the references in the book that point back  
to the tube and the way these "characters" never seem to drop  
character, how so much of their dialog either sounds like dialog from  
the Tube or is a reference to the tube.

If Gravity's Rainbow" is about "The Bomb," then Vineland is about The  
Tube.

After all that, I think the LA Times Review by Frank McConnell  
previously cited offers the best explanation of what Vineland is  
really all "about."

	Oh, yes-how does it all turn out? Well, you see, this is a sort of
	fairy tale, so of course everybody — including a lot of groovy
	people I haven't even told you about-winds up back in
	Vineland, and Vond is punished, and Prairie and Zoyd and
	Frenesi get together again ... sort of.

	And that's the point, too. No one writing now understands better
	than does Thomas Pynchon the potential for waste and disaster
	lurking in the corporate heart of America. And no one, I believe,
	hopes more hopelessly for The Happy Ending, the right end to
	the fable, where the generations embrace and the land
	blossoms. So that the last paragraph of Vineland — I really can't
	describe it for you — makes the whole of it either the saddest or
	the most optimistic story I know. If no one else in our centers of
	power, then at least this one strange and lovely man continues
	to keep faith with the noisy and disruptive and underground
	idea of the republic.

	And the morning the UPS man delivered my review copy of
	Vineland was the morning George Bush announced his
	invasion, for the most drug-free and ethically hygienic reasons,
	of Panama.

http://vineland.pynchonwiki.com/wiki/index.php?title=LA_Times_Review_-_Frank_McConnell