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

[Bekah]

On Feb 23, 2009, at 12:09 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:
> 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.


And perhaps with Inherent Vice,  we'll see the end, "terminus, final  
stop"  of yet another frontier - ending in the California surf,  but  
the frontier of 60's
pushing-the limits-thinking.   Maybe it'll be  about the boundaries  
and borderlands of M&D,  the Turner Thesis (1893/AtD)  revisited.   
Because although Vineland may be the physical part of the "last  
frontier of an expanding and colonizing America"  the spirit, the old  
longing for wilderness may still be alive.

Nice post,  Robin.  Thanks.  I liked the bits about home.

Bek



On Feb 23, 2009, at 12:09 PM, Robin Landseadel wrote:
> 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
>