VL--IV, "a gig of death" or Don't Take the Piano Player!

[Mark Kohut]

Thinking of some later stuff in Vineland, you've convinced me.  I think you are somehow righter than I am....

yet, regarding How?,  I am still lost........

The Rest of yuz, pipe up!



----- Original Message ----
From: Robin Landseadel <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sunday, January 4, 2009 1:03:54 PM
Subject: Re: VL--IV, "a gig of death" or Don't Take the Piano Player!

The Karma's serious here, even if these stateside folks are too dim to be aware of that fact.  By the time Pynchon got to Aptos, he saw this country move from left to right, and Vineland in many ways is a demonstration of that shift. He also started seeing Karma as counterweight to Entropy, that there was a law of nature that moves towards life.

My sense is that Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus [and other works by those two pomo philosophers] is driving a lot of Vineland. I haven't had the chance to go all that far into their writings [and when I read their head-spinning diatribes I'm left dazed and confused], but the notion of the simulacrum supplanting---somehow becoming greater than---the real seems like the mesh and weave of all the satire in Vineland, much like "V.", where there is the nervous sense that humans are in the process of being replaced by a more technically advanced [yet entropic] creation if they aren't already in the process of falling apart altogether.

I'll admit that it doesn't help that the "Google Books" edition of Anti-Oedipus is upside down:

http://books.google.com/books?id=4KCfPtku4qAC&printsec=frontcover&dq=anti+oedipus


. . .or that I'm too broke to get my hands on a copy [or pay any lingering library fines.] But the dribs and drabs of D&G that I'm exhumed so far speak to me of the seductions of of the symbolic  over the physically manifest. It is not enough that this  bag or box contains food---it must also be connected to [be a symbolic representative of] the fantasy world, the hyper-real world, of the Tube.

Again, much of Against the Day demonstrates the sources for many of the concepts that come to fruition [though rot is really more like it] in Vineland. Think of the space in AtD devoted to those "Range Wars" that claimed electromagnetic space in the name of corporate empire.

If The Crying of Lot 49 is about  Oedipus, could Vineland be about Anti-Oedipus?

On Jan 4, 2009, at 7:32 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> whatever BIG THINKING Frenchman's THOTS we use, it is fake, fakiness, phoniness, inauthenticity everywhere at Kahuna Airlines, as if TRP had just overlaid The Recognitions on The Tibetan Book of the Dead or, of course, kept touching bottom with his vision of fakeness in Vineland America--- even in its Eastern Religions since the 60s ?
> 
> This, I suggest, is NOT anything like the serious concept of Karma in AtD, say; this is OBA satirizing it, as almost everything in Vineland is satirized.