By OZ FRITZ
Special guest blogger
"The way out is via the door.
Why is it that no one will use this method?" – RAW quoting Confucius as told in Chapel Perilous by Gabriel Kennedy (p.46).
"For Wilson, when people digested language charged with 'meta-dimensional meaning, improbable structure, and even craziness, new circuits were produced within the human nervous system.'" op. cit. (p. 49)
How does one communicate in the Higher Dimensions or the Higher Brain Circuits? Rational and linear language stays close to the C3 territory. It works well with the four primate circuits. Images, allegories, metaphors, puzzles, riddles and koans appear to occasionally tease cognition of higher consciousness. Images get created in various ways. A basic example in Vineland comes when Pynchon compares Hector to Ricardo Montalban, a popular Mexican TV and film actor well known to people of a certain age. He nonverbally creates a recognizable picture of Hector's mannerisms to people who recognize the image of Montalban from his acting. This example won't necessarily spark higher awareness, but it shows the same principle of nonverbal communication through association.
Pynchon seems a master of creating images; a real magician. The more you bring to the game, the more these images open up to you. In this sense, reading a Pynchon work becomes interactive, it requires the reader's active attention and participation to start getting the full effect. There are many ways to go with it, everyone makes their own lexicon of associations to a degree depending upon how deep down the rabbit hole to Wonderland one chooses to go. These images brought to life in the mind of the reader are what I'm calling metalinguistics admittedly a bit of a stretch from the academic definition of the term ("the ability to reflect on and manipulate language, treating it as an object of thought" - Ellen Bialystok). Stefan Mattessich looks at the nature of Pynchon's metalinguistics in Lines of Flight - Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon. Discussing The Crying of Lot 49: "Oedipa Maas's search for the meaning of Tristero and of the communication system known as WASTE is never far away from an impoverishment of sense that threatens to collapse the novel into a heap of ambiguous signs. What I attempt to demonstrate in this chapter is that the meaning of the novel lies in its formal incoherence. ... By undermining its own narrative and analogical consistency, the novel dramatizes a social order that subsumes subjects in immaterial nexuses of discourse, communication systems and information. The reader no less than Oedipa is caught in these nexuses and compelled to grasp the truth of the novel in its parodies of the interpretive act itself. The time of the novel englobes us in its metalinguistic immanence, in other words, and demands a performative theorizing to be understood."
Vineland looks a little different in that there seems more coherence in its form though I would say it has its fair share of "immaterial nexuses of discourse" those episodes when the story goes off on a tangent. Vineland doesn't demand theorizing to be understood, it does just fine as a straight up adventure, but we find a wealth of esoteric information by digging deeper.
Nonverbal literary communication through images appears related to Chinese ideograms which Ezra Pound explored in The Cantos. Other thematic parallels can be found between Pound's epic tale of the tribe and Vineland's more localized tale of the tribe. "Wilson regarded The Cantos as 'the most ambitious of all modern poems' presenting history as a perpetual battle between those supporting individual rights and those obsessed with power and control" (Chapel Perilous, p. 17). The dialectic between freedom and fascism becomes an overarching theme in Vineland. The end of chapter 4 briefly illustrates this when someone plays a Fascist Toejam cassette before the Vomitones drive off into the future implying a sense of freedom. The freedom/fascism dialectic appears most concisely in the metalinguistics of Fascist Toejam. The only other instance I know of "toejam" in a cultural artifact appears in the lyrics to "Come Together" by The Beatles, a song inspired by (he donated the chorus) and about Dr. Timothy Leary. It goes like this:
"He wear no shoeshine, he got toejam football
He got monkey finger, he shoot Coca-Cola
He say 'I know you, you know me'
One thing I can tell you is you got to be free"
I maintain that these ideograms or nonverbal images, whatever we wish to call them, leads to a form of telepathy, i.e. nonverbal communication. It can also be construed as heightened intuition which we shall see subtle examples of in Vineland.
Chapter 5 sends us on a loop in time, from the present back to Zoyd and Frenesi splitting up then whirling forward back to the present in the final paragraph. The chapter starts and ends with a business card that we find out more about later. Remember that it entered the story in this chapter, 5. We also find a few references to the old version of the show Hawaii Five-0 and a number of film mentions. The song Zoyd and Takeshi play, Wacky Coconuts, reminds me of the Marx Brothers. The Coconuts was their first film and Wacky is the name of Harpo's character in The Big Store.
P. 57 "Feel like Mildred Pierce's husband Bert," – Zoyd references a depression era book called Mildred Pierce, a psychological drama by James M. Cain, according to Wikipedia. Mildred's eldest daughter Veda plays a major part in the story.
P. 60 - 62 has multiple references to death. Zoyd contemplates suicide. Later, he's offered "[a] gig of death. He calls a 24-hour number to get hired. Key #24 corresponds with Death in the tarot. Then, "2:30 A.M." gives a 23, a number frequently associated with death; also a number that indicates the bardo.
The number one holds significance for Pynchon, make of that what you will. Using Joycean word deconstruction we have the Vomitones = Vomit-ones. We've met Ralph Wayvone Jr. = Way-v-one. Later we'll meet his father with the same name. In this chapter, right before Zoyd dies in his suicide fantasy he hears "Jack Lord say, 'Book him, Danno – Suicide One.'" P. 62 has Zoyd reaching for a "dash-one" - military slang for a User's Manual. This chapter ends with the phrase, "as if she were supposed to be the one to have it all along." Coincidentally, the word "once" adds to 133 which corresponds with "vine" in Sepher Sephiroth.
Next week: please read chapter 6, pages 68 - 91
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