IVIV Hope Harlingen: a wacky theory (possible spoilers)

[Tore Rye Andersen]

alice:
 
> VL is, many things, but definitely a novel about how 
> TV has changed how we live, how we work and how we love. 
> It's a jeremiad and the Tube is what it screams across 
> the sky about. IV is even more grave.
 
An interesting passage here is Isaiah Two Four's words to 
Zoyd towards the end of VL:
 
"Whole problem 'th you folks's generation," Isaiah opined,
"nothing personal, is you believed in your Revolution, put
your lives right out there for it - but you sure didn't 
understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of 
you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el 
deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to your real 
enemies, and even in 1970 dollars - it was way too cheap...." 
(VL, 373)
 
1970 dollars - and when does IV take place, exactly? 
 
It would seem Pynchon (or the implied author, or whoever) points
to 1970 as some kind of sea change. The Tube doesn't play a 
very large part in the sections of VL that take place in the 
Sixties. Those sections are more about the material, and potentially 
revolutionary, medium of film - 24fps and all that - just as GR 
is very much about film. In the sections of VL that deal with
the Eighties, the immaterial medium of the Tube is of course 
pervasive; it's everywhere and everything. 
 
I'm not completely sure I agree with you that "IV is even more 
grave" than VL in its take on TV. VL seems to me to depict the 
end of the end of the line, so to speak, the ultimate deadening 
of affect in those awful Eighties. According to Isaiah Two Four,
1970 signaled the fall from grace, but the fall was only just
beginning back then; in 1984, we hit the ground.
 
In another vein (or another medium), I think the future Internet 
is just as important for IV as the Tube.
 
 
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