VL-IV (13) Kaposvári's Children of the Revolution

[Robin Landseadel]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xJ_agcMy5c

This blog of blogs collects much online chatter that flowed towards  
Stewart v. Cramer last week. These two sentences have direct relation  
to what is going on in Vineland. At the heart is the act of editing  
itself:

	Video is a medium with powerful claims to reality — people
	tend to think that if they saw it, it must be true. This makes it
	uniquely good at manipulating its audience with skillful editing.

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/13/weekend-opinionator-the-magi-of-the-meltdown/

It's in the editing, and whatever it is that makes "Vineland"  
Vineland, it's in the editing. The Movie/Hollywood themes are huge in  
Gravity's Rainbow—hello, Mickey Rooney!—as are the Television themes  
in Vineland. The storytelling and editing strategies of Vineland  
reflect the conventions of the Tube, as Márk Kaposvári points out in  
"Vineland's America":

	The whole novel is represented as a movie with one line of plot
	that is merely twisted chronologically, and never in the
	postmodernist manner, as Brian McHale articulates in his
	famous book, Postmodernist Fiction, ontologically. There is no
	collision of discourses and worlds in the novel but only one
	world with one discourse is what is presented. We are given a
	picture about the picture, that is, the author does not strives to
	give back (the chaotic, contingent and many times inscrutable)
	reality (as he tried earlier in Gravity’s Rainbow, or the Crying of
	Lot 49), but only to give back how American authorities stage
	reality. So the stylistic twist here, as it is already mentioned, is
	that Pynchon writes in terms of master-narratives in order to
	deconstruct their credulity

	http://tinyurl.com/dza9s4

	It was disheartening to see how much he depended upon these
	Tubal fantasies about his profession, relentlessly pushing their
	propaganda of cops-are-only- got-to-do-their-job turning agents
	of government repression into sympathetic heroes. Nobody
	thought it was peculiar anymore, no more than the routine
	violations of constitutional rights these characters performed
	week after week,now absorbed into the vernacular of American
	expectations.
	Vineland, page 345

Vineland depends on these Tubal fantasies, it's the stuff the book is  
made out of, like Lego. Perhaps more Soap Opera/Miniseries than Movie  
of the Week, Vineland has characters who hew to Tubal good guy/bad guy  
conventions. Brock is as nasty a "bad guy" as they come, while his  
costume is of TV's White Knight, a Steve McGarrett  type.

	Brock Yond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the
	sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for
	it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against
	parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story,
	Brock saw the deep - if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the
	sometimes touching - need only to stay children forever, safe
	inside some extended national Family.
	Vineland, page 269

Márk Kaposvári:

	. . . for example that while in his previous novels Pynchon never
	identifies the mysterious forces or the people who are in actual
	control of our lives and to what he in Gravity’s Rainbow
	sometimes referred to as Them (in opposition with Us) now, in
	Vineland, is readily identified with the State and its appendices
	(like that of the FBI that help in the process of the government’s
	exertion of power). In Mark Webster’s words: “[a] nameless,
	faceless menace no longer hovers somewhere just out of view,
	controlling events and people for unknown and vaguely sinister
	reasons, [t]he villains are known and quite familiar: the federal
	government” (Webster 1990). David Cowart reassure these
	statements in saying that “the discoveries of connectedness that
	propel and sustain the quest in Pynchon’s earlier work … give
	way to more commonplace discoveries of governmental
	conspiracy. The paranoia in Vineland is rooted in the political
	here and now. It becomes less metaphysical, more local”
	(Cowart 1990, 178)

	http://tinyurl.com/dza9s4

====================================================

Fast forward to Vineland's happily-ever-after, Made-for Television  
finale, where the plot threads play out like an Ed Sullivan juggler  
from southern Slovenia throwing bowling pins synchronized to the  
overture to "La Gazza Ladra". We are left with a glimpse of America's  
eternal childhood as mediated by your television.

Over and over the P-list has pointed out the implausibility of  
Frenesi's motivations—she starts out seemingly a hero of the  
revolution but in the end sells herself out for too little  
compensation. On page 85, Frenesi has a pavlovian response to some  
images on the tube:

	Believing that the rays coming out of the TV screen would act as
	a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits, Frenesi now
	popped the Tube on and checked the listings. There was a
	rerun of the perennial motorcycle-cop favorite "CHiPs" on in a
	little while. She felt a rising of blood, a premonitory dampness.
	Let the grim feminist rave, Frenesi knew there were living
	women, down in the world, who happened, like herself, to be
	crazy about uniforms on men, entertained fantasies while on
	the freeway about the Highway Patrol, and even, as she was
	planning to do now, enjoyed masturbating to Ponch and Jon
	reruns on the Tube, and so what?
	Vineland, page 85

. . . echos the pavlovian themes of Gravity's Rainbow.

In Gravity's Rainbow, Slothrop has a pavlovian affair involving a  
certain plastic used in an air-born weapons delivery system. In  
Vineland, Frenesi's classical conditioning via the Tube produces a  
conditioned response to signifiers of Power & Control, though it seems  
as though the impulse is already "in the blood":

	Sasha believed her daughter had "gotten" this uniform fetish
	from her. It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but
	since her very first Rose Parade up till the present she'd felt in
	herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority,
	especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on
	the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or maitre d's
	in restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she
	further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic
	Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of
	seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control.
	Vineland, page 85

At the bottom of it all, are Frenesi's responses from signifiers of  
power and control any less plausible than Slothrop's responses to  
Impolex G? In Frenesi's case context and reasoning is more "local."

Chapter six covers both the causes of Frenesi's conditioned responses  
and her life-long tendency to sell herself short. Chapter thirteen is  
Brock Vond's chapter. Whereas the young revolutionaries of Vineland  
pursue their quests unaware of how the political propaganda from the  
tube is motivating their "radical" moves, Brock Vond knows what  
buttons are being pushed, what buttons to push, and how to be a player  
in "the dark joys of social control."