VL-IV (12) pages 218-226 The End of the Road.

[Robin Landseadel]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 9:18 AM, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> I student taught in Orick  as the Art Teacher. The town itself is  
> pretty dismal, though located near a beautiful stretch of coast.  
> Most students were from an ugly roadside trailer park.  One thing  
> that makes it a credible site for a thanatoid convention is the  
> large number of RV's that roost near there on the coast throughout  
> the year. I think there was a similar camp inland in the area.   
> These places become little communities.

Sounds good to me. All of the locales where I've hung out in southern  
Oregon/upper Vineland were conclaves of double-wides occupying spots  
previously reserved for RVs and other leisure oriented vehicles,  
usually just a short walk from the shore. Incredible coastline up  
there on the northern edge of Vineland. Depressed people in a  
depressed economy right on the western edge of paradise.

Pynchon's sense of California as terminal dislocation also points to  
"Vineland" as a terminus, the final stop, a land of the dead or at  
least a suburb of the semi-dead, two filled with those who are not  
really alive, Thanatoids as perfect couch potatoes, a depiction of  
America's collective bardo state while hypnotized in front of the Tube.

Bekah's inspired posting of http://www.thomasscoville.com/BardoComix/  
gets closer to what's really going on here. Never forget that we are  
dealing with a SATIRIST here, no point in getting soggy about these  
things. Thomas Scoville's "Metrosexual Tarot" is a hoot as well, and  
pretty much in line with New Age musings scattered about Vineland &  
gathered together by Pynchon, albeit presented here with a decidedly  
gay twist:

http://www.thomasscoville.com/metrosexual/

Thomas Scoville's re-telling of the Bardol Thodol is as mediated by  
the tube as Zoyd's annual jump through the window of the Cucumber  
Lounge. You can just hear Johnny Gilbert's avuncular bass-baritone  
intoning — "Well Strap In For A Wild Ride because you've won a ticket  
to a complicated sequence of spiritual adventures with an entire  
pantheon of blissful and wrathful deities!" Next up—The Daily Double!

Judging by Vairocana's panels, Impiety appears to be the moral  
equivalent of heresy, which has got to be a goldmine for our beloved  
author. No wonder our karmic insurance adjustor is equated with the  
Three Stooges.

Being dislocated from one's home is a constant in our author's  
meditations on lives in motion. Oed, Slothrop, Zoyd and all the  
Traverse boys are running. When it's all over, Oedipa really doesn't  
have a home anymore, neither does Zoyd and Slothrop may no longer even  
exist. The Traversi are thrown from the Colorado mines into chase  
scenes interleaved with grail quests before finally landing in what  
will become Vineland. Mason & Dixon haul ass westward till reaching a  
terminus,:

	. . .Within the Fortnight, they are join'd by a Delegation of
	Indians, sent by Sir William Johnson, most of them Mohawk
	fighters, who will remain with the Party till the end of October,
	when, reaching a certain Warrior Path, they will inform the
	Astronomers that their own Commissions from the Six Nations
	allow them to go no further,- with its implied Corollary, that this
	Path is as far West as the Party, the Visto, and the Line, may
	proceed.

	This will not come as an unforeseen blow, for Hugh Crawfford,
	accompanying the Indians, informs the Surveyors of it first thing.
	"Sort of like Death,- you know it's out there ahead, tho' not
	when, so you'll ever be hoping for one more Day, at least.
	Mason & Dixon, page 656

But we all already know how much further west this quest for a place  
where "The Fish jump into your arms" & "The Indians know Magick" our  
intrepid tripsters will travel. California, in all of Pynchon, seems  
to be the end of the road. Even in Gravity's Rainbow, after spending  
most of the book wandering around the back alleys of barely post-war  
Europe, we find ourselves, finally, in the Orpheum Theater in LA.

Dirk Vanderbeke's short article "Vineland in the Novels of John Barth  
and Thomas Pynchon" touches on California as "The End of the Road":

	In Pynchon's Vineland some of the elements of The End of the
	Road are re-investigated. Again, I do not think that it will be
	necessary to give an outline of the plot; as a matter of fact, this
	would be quite impossible, as the novels of Thomas Pynchon
	do not yield to any kind of summary. Let it suffice that the novel
	is based on the quest of a young girl, Prairie Wheeler, for her
	mother, Frenesi, who in the 60s had originally been a member
	of a radical film crew but crossed the lines and for some time
	became the lover and instrument of the evil principle of the
	novel, the DA Brock Vond. As in The End of the Road, the novel
	begins and ends in Vineland, but it is Vineland, California, and
	30 years have passed.

	Again, Vineland marks an end of the road, in a sense one might
	say that Vineland is the last frontier of an expanding and
	colonizing America:

		Someday this would be all part of a Eureka – Crescent City
		– Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast,
		forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from
		what early visitors in Spanish and Russian ships had seen.
		Along with noting the size and fierceness of the salmon, the
		fogbound treachery of the coast, the fishing villages of the
		Yurok and Tolowa people, log keepers not known for their
		psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than
		once,the sense they had of some invisible boundary, met
		when approaching from the sea ... (Vineland, page 317)

http://www.diss.sense.uni-konstanz.de/amerika/vanderbeke.htm