Zapping Krap TV & Tunes in IV

[alice wellintown]

Brian McHale is one of the best readers of Postmodern fiction. Even if
one asserts that Pynchon doesn't write Postmodern fiction or that the
term Postmodern is not a useful one, it's still not possible to argue
that Brian McHale is one of the best readers of Pynchon's fiction. VL
confused him. Although every serious or even not so serious reader of
Pynchon's works should read McHale's essay,  "Zapping, the art of
switching channels: on Vineland," the essay poses far more questions
than it answers, including the most importnat one: has Pynchon written
a critique of TV? Is VL a jeremiad aganst TV and its negative
influences on American life?   McHale has trouble with this one. Since
the narrator is also TV saturated, it seems to McHale that Pynchon has
not written a critique of TV. He gives up this notion and dives into a
"Death & TV" Jameson cognative mapping fox hole and puts his head
down. End of wonderful essay that reaches no conclusions. It does hint
at something wonderful and quite insightful: TV vs. Film.   Why is
film better? Lots of reasons that McHale hints at including that Film
was useful to the Labor Movement, SDS, Revolutionaries trying to
expose Nixon/Reagan Fascism. But there are other reasons too, like how
TV is Crap by design. Kinda like what happened to Music, as I
suggested in the Beatles and Liverpool stuff. The Beatles played to
working class kids in de-industrialized Liverpool. They were picking
up American music, black music, and they were laying in the
undergrounds where American Jazz played. There were not BIG American
media in Liverpool to market Boy Bands. It was Live! Not Plastic,
Live.   IV is more VL. But the narrator complicity remains an issue.
And it is worse in IV because P has elected to return to a CL49
"detective" genre and employ a third person limited narrator.   But
McHale, who says that misreading is when Modernist Readers Read
Postmodern texts, Misreads Pynchon's narrator in VL. That's why he
gets stuck and tosses in the towel. He can't quite work out that
Pynchon's narrator, who can no more avoid the Tube than Hector of Zoyd
is also subjected to Pynchon's critique.   This is what happens to a
great novelist in a TV saturated culture.

Pynchon didn't sell out boyz. He stuck it right in their Tube.

And, all of you who didn't finish AtD, this books for you.