The Burial of the Dead

[Mark Kohut]

To oversimplify: What Pynchon knew early, viscerally, is that the medium
is ALSO our world.....

--- On Thu, 8/13/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: The Burial of the Dead
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, August 13, 2009, 2:56 PM
> 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.
> 
>