The Burial of the Dead

[alice wellintown]

Bekah wrote,
> And also straddling that line between life and death are the Thanatoids of  Vineland.

What Brian McHale calls Mapping and Zapping.

At VL.129 Prairie asks DL how the guys (DL & Takeshi) met. DL replies
with a scream. In the world of Vineland proper, the scream's intensity
is unparalleled: more intense than anything Prairie has ever heard
outside of a Saturday-morning cartoon.
Saturday-morning cartoon screams are heard throughout this novel. For
example, when we meet Frenesi and Flash they talk about hearing each
other scream at cartoon level intensity. In that same chapter, Brock
Vond's screams could be heard above the traffic noise … (pg. 69).

Looks like a cartoon, acts like one, screams like one … must be a
cartoon, right? Not exactly.

In this novel (for example, beginning at page 68) the Screen between
TV land and Vineland proper is permeable. In fact, just like in GR,
all of the worlds interpenetrate and all of the membranes between the
worlds are permeable. Frenesi's surfacing is not simply a matter of
the Her-story  that Zoyd and Sasha told Prairie being popped like a
cherry and a cartoon balloon  by DL, she surfaces from underground
from and to several different levels.


Also, it's not only that the characters flash in and out of cartoon
mode (Two-ton Carmine and the Vomitones VL96-96) ) or TV sitcom mode
(Zoyd weeping at the Hawaiian hotel VL.60), or Monster Movie Mode, or
Western,  or Hard Boiled Detective Novel Mode, Dream Mode, Drug Dream
Mode, and so on, the worlds around them are flashing in and out as
well.


"Zapping" (McHale's term) does not quite explain this. It's far more
complicated and there are examples, such as the story I mentioned in a
prior post, Washington Irving's "The Devil and Tom Walker," that are
not postmodern; although this term "postmodeern" can be more trouble
than it's worth and McHale does wrestle with it.

That being said, McHale is the best Introduction to what's going on in
VL and his lessons apply to the cartooning, zapping, mapping, of
characters in all of Pynchon's works.


For example, Flash and Frenesi have a son and his name is Justin.
Justin enters Vineland space at page 87. He has been watching
cartoons. He moves into Vineland space because he is taking an
extended (30 minute) commercial break between cartoon programming
(what he's been watching) and the next best thing on the Tube (what he
plans to watch after the 30
minute break). For 30 minutes, he will play Reagan (President and
Actor) and cast his parents in the roles of Reagan's press conference.
  They were about to begin playing a game, a kind of two -player video
game. As he enters, his father asks him how the Transformers (cartoon
world characters) are making out. Justin zaps, changes channels,
shifts into news programming, Reagan press conference mode, pretends
not to hear the question about cartoons he calls on his mother. His
mother (being a 60s person and a Gates she is driven by revenge)
explains that the questions are revenge for all those crazy non-stop
questions kids ask parents as they move through early childhood, the
parents are now asking the kid the questions.  Of course, the kid
isn't going to answer any questions because he's in Reagan mode.

Frenesi's favorite Justin question: How do we know when we are
dreaming and when we are not dreaming?

Somw early critics of GR described it as one consciousness dreaming.
This is certainly too simple, but to deal with the complexity is
cerrtainly beyond the scope of a Listserve discussion.

To describe and define. Two difficult yet essential steps we must take
if we are to appreicate and evaluate the new asthetic that artists
like Pynchon are engaged in making. This is one reason why it is often
difficult to distinguish the work of the brilliant critic from the
work it purports to evaluate. And, with artists like Pynchon, artist
who stretch the big canvas, extend the medium to redefine the
relationship between art and life. Doing so, as James Wood and that NY
Times critic so brazenly acknowledge, neceessarily alienates the best
seller audience. AtD a best seller? My goodness, that is a foolish
notion. Yhe book alienated most of the potential readers let alone tha
vast majority of the best sellers readers who can not endure the
challange to modernist readings not to mention conventional values and
the structures and systems that come with them.

Understanding Pynchon may never be possible. That's not the point of
his writing. Acceptance or at last appreciation is the point.  But
paranoia, insecurity, imtolerance ...these are anathema to Pynchon's
art, incompatable with appreciation of art.