Zoyd

[alice wellintown]

Characterization is the process of conveying information about
characters in narrative or dramatic works.  Characters may be
presented by means of description, through their actions, speech, or
thoughts.

Any reading that reduces characters in VL to types in a “political
novel” or political allegory must strip the novel of the intricate,
subtle, clever, modern and postmodern use of characterization.  The
reviews of VL underrated it because so many reviewers misread the
novel by reducing it to a political allegory and thus reducing its
complex characterization to typing.  Since its publication and review,
 several articles, essays, dissertations, Wikis, journals, and even
books  have analyzed and explicated the novel’s complex settings,
including the ontological and epistemological interpenetrations, its
use of television and film, and its clever and subtle use of
characterization. Some of these, like the one I cited in a previous
post (McHale’s “Zapping, the Art of Switching Channels: on Vineland”)
approach the novel as a postmodern text and improve the critical
reading of the work by demonstrating how the intricacies of postmodern
characterization function. To deal with the obvious complexity of
characterization, the allegorical readings, in contrast, must insist
that characters are Both/And   allegorical types / fully developed. On
the allegorical page Zoyd suffers sloth and so does Everyman, but on
the fully developed character page, Zoyd has idiosyncrasies, foibles,
faults, anxieties, cares and concerns, insecurities and
inconsistencies that render him a real human and a realistic novel
character.


We've worked on this for some time so I'll address it.

Zoyd never loses his cherry because he is a hippie type who is not
political but only R/romantically (Romantic =American Romance figure /
romantically= marriage to Frenesi) involved in the failed Revolution.
This reading then reduces the subtle and clever characterization of
Zoyd to a type by characterizing his sin with the traditional
allegorical set:  Deadly Sins / Dante’s Circles. As one reader here
pointed out, Zoyd does not commit treason (Dante’s Ninth Circle), his
sin is Sloth (Dante’s Fifth Circle and the Fourth of the Seven Deadly
Sins). Frenesi suffers Lust, commits Treason and is thus a Ninth
Circle figure.

 The allegorical reading also reduces the complex world(s) the
characters live in, how these worlds are connected, and the forces,
visible and invisible, real and imagined, straight and drug induced,
positively paranoid and negatively paranoid.

Some weakness (free will or original sin and its deadly offspring is,
in part, the cause of the “daisy chain” (characters rat one another
out and so on), which then leads to the Victory of gnostic or
dehumanizing Systems or “forces of control.”

Also, allegorical readings fail to deal with the competing narratives
provided by the texts, often by characters who are bound together by
history and their seperate though connected needs to write it.
Privledging Zoyd's view of what happened at the beach and rejecting
Hector's view allows the allegorical reader or political reader to
save Zoyd's cherry, but it loses the rest of the text's body in the
process.