VLVL(12) pgs 239- 246 AtD pgs 554/555

[Robin Landseadel]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mI3eBTMXSiU&feature=PlayList&p=79722F02D4FDA866&playnext=1&index=10

	"Damn you, Blundell, damn you all. You have no idea what
	you're heading into. This world you take to be 'the' world will
	die, and descend into Hell, and all history after that will belong
	properly to the history of Hell."

Laura wrote:

> The whole chapter, with its shifts in time and persepctive, seems  
> like a Rashoman-like approximation of the truth.
	
	"Here," said Miles, looking up and down the tranquil Menin
	road. "Flanders will be the mass grave of History."

	"Well."

	"And that is not the most perverse part of it. They will all
	embrace death. Passionately. "

	"The Flemish."

> Flashbacks, unlike memories, are supposed to be true:  we're being  
> shown something that actually happened.


	"The world. On a scale that has never yet been imagined. Not
	some religious painting in a cathedral, not Bosch, or Brueghel,
	but this, what you see, the great plain, turned over and
	harrowed, all that lies below brought to the surface-deliberately
	flooded, not the sea come to claim its due but the human
	counterpart to that same utter absence of mercy-for not a village
	wall will be left standing. League on league of filth, corpses by
	the uncounted thousands, the breath you took for granted
	become corrosive and deathgiving."

> Hitchcock used this standard of truth to con the audience in the  
> movie Stage Fright.

	"Sure sounds unpleasant," said Miles.

	"You don't believe any of this. You should."

	"Of course I believe you. You're from the future, aren't you?
	Who'd know better?"

	"I think you know what I'm talking about."

	"We haven't got the technical know-how," Miles said, pretending
	a massive patience. "Remember? We are only skyshipjockeys,
	we have trouble enough with three dimensions, what would we
	do with four?"

	"Do you think we chose to come here, to this terrible place?
	Tourists of disaster, jump in some time machine, oh, how about
	Pompeii this weekend, Krakatoa perhaps, but then volcanoes
	are so boring really, eruptions, lava, over in a minute, let's try
	something really-"

	"Thorn, you don't have to-"

	"We have had no choice," fiercely, having abandoned the
	measured delivery Miles had come to associate with
	Trespassers. "No more than ghosts may choose what places
	they must haunt ... you children drift in a dream, all is smooth,
	no interruptions, no discontinuities, but imagine the fabric of
	Time torn open, and yourselves swept through, with no way
	back, orphans and exiles who find you will do what you must,
	however shameful, to get from end to end of each corroded
	day."

> He starts the movie with a flashback that we assume to be true, but  
> turns out not to be.


	Miles, taken by a desolate illumination, reached out his hand,
	and Thorn, seeing his intention, flinched and backed away, and
	in the instant Miles understood that there had been no miracle,
	no brilliant technical coup, in fact no "time travel" at all-that the
	presence in this world of Thorn and his people had been owing
	only to some chance blundering upon a shortcut through
	unknown topographies of Time, enabled somehow by whatever
	was to happen here, in this part of West Flanders where they
	stood, by whatever terrible singularity in the smooth flow of
	Time had opened to them.

> Pynchon gives us a conditional flashforward, a "could have been  
> true," in the friendly chat between Weed and Rex.


"Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two it's  
what the world might be."



On the one hand, Vineland is "about" an American Family, pursued by  
bad Guy Brock Vond. On the other hand, Vineland is "about" a  
particular quality of juggling time in a narrative, the switchbacks in  
time opened up by the possibilities of the novel. The editing  
possibilities of film—Intolerance comes to mind. . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zkgSIdOU_cc

— opened up new ways of juggling with time, Joyce & film & the novel  
as we now know it . . .

> Are all the flashbacks necessarily true?

	"You are not here," he whispered in a speculative ecstasy. "Not
	fully manifest."

> Maybe the flashback to Rex giving away his car to the  
> revolutionaries from BAAD is meant as a variation of an urban  
> legend, rather than reality.

I do believe that particular passage was out-sourced from Mau-Mauing  
the Flack Catchers. It's partially what went down, partially a joke  
about what went down. Well, yes this sort of thing happened, amazing  
what honkey's 'll do to be "cool."

>> . . . made for TV movies and mini-series, multi-generational
>> sagas that resort to flashbacks to sustain continuity. . .  juggle  
>> time to resolve a "mystery. . ."
>>
>> Of course, "Citizen Kane" is the all-time champion of the technique.
>

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg7VUk4DjIk&feature=related

	Miles and Thorn directed their wheels back toward the sea. As
	evening descended, Thorn, who honored smaller promises at
	least, produced his ukulele and played the Chopin E-minor
	Nocturne, the tenuous notes, as light departed, acquiring
	substance and depth. They found an inn and ate supper
	companionably, and returned to Ostend in the owl-light.