The Happy Ending?

Well after a stop-start pair of weeks with Vineland, I'm officially more than halfway thru the oeuvre. But I'll get right to it.

What I think needs reconciling is Vineland’s “death-by-Tube” with the corporate paper Death of Gravity’s Rainbow. Back in GR, somewhere late in the novel, we are told that “Death has been the source of Their power…we only die because They want us to.” (539) I take this as essentially representative of how the big They system of the War functions: They reappropriate Our deaths and sell them back to us. Granted it’s a *bit* more complex than that, but anyway, I think Old Tom prescription shows up at the end of GR during the last moments before Slothrop fades out, as “The object of life is to die a weird death.” (757) I understood “weird” to mean “personal” – unique and individual. So if the War was the technique in the ‘40s, and the Tube is the technique in the ‘80s, it stands to reason that they should have similar effects on our perceptions of death, which is what Weed Atman is thinking about around 218:

“…the soul newly in transition often doesn’t like to admit – indeed, will deny vehemently – that it’s really dead, having slipped so effortlessly into the new dispensation that it finds no difference between the weirdness of life and the weirdness of death, an enhancing factor in Takeshi’s opinion being television, which with its history of picking away at the topic with doctor shows, war shows, cop shows, murder shows, had trivialized the Big D itself. If mediated lives, he figured, why not mediated deaths?”

Again, “weirdness” comes up (although I’m not like, rilly sure how that connects to GR’s weirdness?). What’s difficult for me to parse out is how “mediated deaths” would benefit Them in the same way as the confiscated deaths of the War. If Fear of Death gave them power, what do They gain by trivializing it? Separately, the two logics make sense enough. The closest I think I can get to making them match up is to say that perhaps there is a subtle reappropriation going on here with the Tube, in that by trivializing Death via various shows, we would be so constantly overloaded with death in its pre-approved genres that we would be unable to see Our Own Death, the thing that should be absolutely singular and personal, as any different than the serialized, mediated deaths of the Tube, and thus, be unknowingly surrendering it to Them.

Mucho Maas (in his weirdo cameo) says some stuff that seems to affirm this point, save for the fact that he damns the Tube, not for stealing our deaths, but for convincing us we’ll die at all. He claims that acid gave them a “beautiful certainty” of immortality and that the Tube is a way for them to “keep us distracted” so that we can’t fight their insistence that we will in fact die. “Give us too much to process, fill up every minute…it’s what the Tube is for.” (314) But I’m willing to say that the acid-certainty of eternal life is a hippie synonym for owning your own death (even if that ownership is just the right to refuse death entirely). The acid-optimists are matched by the revolutionaries, who by choosing to be part of the revolution were also choosing how and why they would die, and of course, claiming their own deaths. Isaiah Two Four tells Zoyd at the reunion that the “Minute the Tube got hold of you, that was it.”(373) The Tube castrated the spirit of revolution, and that spirit was founded on the personal-ness of an individual’s life (read: death). I mean, it doesn’t exactly dovetail with GR, but it’s pretty close, right?

When Flash and Frenesi are flying into Vineland at the end, there’s a passage where the Frenesi-persona is reflecting on what her life-as-of-late has been, “concluding” that it may all have been another “Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy about kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run.” (354) Well one thing I failed to notice up to this point, probably because of the similar cinematic presence in GR, is that there’s a definite play on Reagan’s history in the movies, which is probably tied into the idea of mediation: in the Tube Age, we aren’t even allowed to have a real president, just an actor playing one. Like how the FBI agents that define Frenesi’s life are probably just character actors. It was a “government-defined history without consequences,” so she says. So is this the great Fast One being pulled over on Americans, that history doesn’t have consequences? In its weird, happy-ending way, it harkens back to GR, the history of the Hereros that they struggle to give a consequence, etc. The Frenesi-persona goes on to identify the herd as, “the destined losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself ‘America’ although somebody knew better.” (354) I’d have to think that the “somebody” in question can be read as the They who are orchestrating the charade, but also maybe as Pynchon himself – he’s writing this book because he knows better, and hopefully we will too afterward.

But these “destined losers” – it’s a pretty clear instance of the Preterite, which is made more interesting because for me, this was the first moment I really imagined Frenesi as one of the Preterite. And it’s this thing with “usefulness” again. If the Preterite are the Used, and the Elect are the Users, is the way out of the system to “useless”? This seems to me like almost an aesthetic philosophy, along the lines of Oscar Wilde’s famous “All art is quite useless.” Sounds kind of like Pynchon laying it on the line, there.

So after all is said and done, I definitely enjoyed Vineland, but it really does elicit a sort of “That’s it?” response when you finish it. I guess the real question would be whether or not that was the intended response all along. I’m inclined to think so, but I think this might also be something I could keep in mind to work into the paper? Should have a first post on M&D on Tuesday, although it might be a little bare since I’m starting the book Sunday/Monday.

Matt