Zapping Krap TV & Tunes in IV

[posthorn at gmail.com]

Who let Fox Mulder in here?

On Tue, Aug 18, 2009 at 9:42 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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.
>
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