I guess the most obvious "thing" to delve into would be the Thanatoids. At the roadside BBQ "YOUR MAMA EATS," Takeshi and DL run into the self-proclaimed Thanatoid, Ortho Bob Dulang, who explains that the name is shorthand for "Thanatoid personality" -- apparently a personality that is "like death, only different." (170) I mean, the first thing that comes to mind is that we're getting some kind of absurb mid-80's variation on the Herero, an entire culture of people (this time without the racial element) that is obsessed with death, to the point of pursuing it actively (but never in the form of just loading up the old shotgun...) From what I saw, there were like 2 main things that set characterize the Thanatoids specifically: (1) that they spend "every waking hour with an eye on the Tube," and that (2) they're death-drive is characterized by a "need for revenge." (173)
So as much as it does seem that the Thanatoids invite this link to the Herero, they definitely lack the elegance and the tragedy that Enzian's crew always seemed to exude in GR. DL calls them "ghosts," and there's the whole thing with their village of Shade Creek (shade --> spirit?) being this sort of lost zone, "a psychic jumping-off town," and the way Takeshi claims that the Thanatoids are "victims of karmic imbalances." (173) But then I was thinking about what we talked about briefly in the Writing Center today, about novels that looks back, and novels that look forward, and I thought this might actually illuminate something about the Thanatoids vs. the Hereros. The Zone-Hereros anticipate their own death, and see it as the great return -- the final, singular event that rationalizes their state. But these Thanatoid "ghosts" and their focus on revenge definitely have the air of looking-back to them. "They were victims" Takeshi explains, as if the death they try to avenge has already happened (like Takeshi's 'technical' own via the Vibrating Palm).
As for the Tube obsession, I'm a little less certain. I guess there isn't necessarily textual evidence I can cite for this, but I've been thinking about the Tube recently as this even more Foucauvian model of the cinematic. In GR, P. used the cinematic (in confluence with the whole delta-t charting of rocket flight) and its existence as 'a sequence of still frames to simulate movement' as at least in some part a metaphor for an invisible corporate segmenting of life into eventual stillness (i.e., death). Perhaps the Tube is an updated version of this, especially the way it's all broken up into regimented half-hour blocks. I say Foucauvian because of that idea in Discipline and Punish about regimentation as a technique for docility, and ultimately control. Seems likely that Pynchon would buy into that theory on a corporate scale?
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The only other thing I really wanted to touch on here is that back when DL is just beginning her tale for Prairie, she comments that it's complicated by "everyone remembering a different story--" (101) I think this is something that I could definitely investigate further as a possible angle for a paper, in that it reminded of the very very cursory reading of Bakhtin and dialogism I had started a year or so ago. This idea of truth being present when all voices are present at once, not that they make up different "parts" of the truth coming together (or at least this is how I remember it). As long as I remember it correctly, it seems like an idea that's really at play in all of Pynchon's stuff, but especially here in Vineland, in the frame of the fragmented memories of stoners and revolutionaries.
Anyway, by Friday I'll be at least close to the end here. I might hold off posting until I actually do finish it tho, and then initiate "Spring Break" after that (like I had mentioned earlier today).
Until then, I want Zoyd back
Matt
I think the Foucauldian/disciplinary angle makes sense to me. I've always felt that I could teach a pretty good class in modern Literary Theory via *Gravity's Rainbow*, which seems to anticipate and/or mirror so much of Foucault, Derridoodle, & all the other Frenchies. Plus Bahktin, as you rightly note. I also wonder if Pynchon doesn't anticipate the biopolitics / resistance on a personal scale of the later Foucault.
ReplyDeleteYou're right that the Thanatoids are cartoon mock-ups of the Hereros, & like you I'm not sure entirely what to do with that. Like the Tube vis a vis cinema, it's a falling-off in intellectual seriousness, though perhaps not in social impact. (Perhaps the opposite?)
I'd like to hear more about looking forward v looking back in Pynchon. Also about our old friends the sentimental surrealists.
It's worth thinking about the end of the novel, too, esp in terms of P's almost-admitted nostalgia for something like the old hippie days (Weed Atman is the tell here, as you say) & also your deep historical research on Reaganomics.