Reader's Guide to Vineland
p. 29 "the samurai condition"
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p. 29 "the samurai condition" The notion of a samurai "always being prepared to die" will be echoed on page 161 when Takeshi is shown to be technically dead, hence living without fear of death, hence always prepared to die. Which makes him a perfect samurai. Or Thanatoid.
he (and we) love so much. Nothing is what it seems; there's always some mystery behind everything. p. 31 "zomoskepsis" As far as we can tell, this is a made-up word. But it's well-made, and means just what it says: The study, or contemplation, of soup or meat broth. Pynchon seems to enjoy making up words. Now and then you run across another "skepsis" word. Two of our advisors spotted "omphaloskepsis" (navel- gazing) in the beginning chapters of Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum. p. 31 "Nothin' meaner than an old hippie that's gone sour." Pynchon himself? p. 32 "Check's in the mayo" A brilliant throw-away Feghoot. In the fifties, a science fiction writer named Grendel Briarton wrote a series of short, funny pieces for Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine titled, "Through Time and Space With Ferdinand Feghoot." They all worked the same way: establishing a silly and complicated story line for the sole purpose of setting up a painfully outrageous pun. Pynchon is addicted to the form; one of the best Feghoots ever written is the "Forty million Frenchmen" gag ("for DeMille young Frenchmen...") on page 559 of Gravity's Rainbow. p. 33 "National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation" Dr. Deeply's Tubal detox operation (NEVER) is clearly a gag on Betty Ford's "Just Say No" Drug Abuse Clinic. This is also the first statement of a central theme: America's national addiction isn't to drugs, it's to the Tube.
reference to the vicious addictiveness of TV.
Lotsa action in this chapter. Zoyd goes off to harvest crawfish at RC and Moonpie's. Then there's a flashback to his hippie wedding with Frenesi -- followed by a flashforward to a short scene with Prairie. Zoyd delivers crawfish to Vineland restaurants with funny names. He meets his old pal Van Meter in a bar and they talk about Frenesi. Zuniga is there too; he has, it seems, escaped from Dr. Deeply's Tubal Detox clinic. In a flashsideways we meet Rick and Chick, Vato and Blood, and the Marquis de Sod. Suddenly, maybe-the-cops (actually it's Brock Vond) seem to be after Zoyd. (Why? Pynchon never explains this very well. It may have something to do with Frenesi, Zoyd's ex-wife, and Vond's jealousy of her -- despite the fact that she's got a new husband, hasn't seen Zoyd in years, and is still in Vond's tight grasp. More likely, Vond is after Prairie; his motivation is only suggested, but it's possible that he wants to recreate his earlier sexual liaison with Frenesi. If (as Vond later claims) he is really Prairie's father, this would be incest!) In any case, men-in-uniform bust into Zoyd's car, which someone else is driving, and break into his house. Suddenly, Zoyd is on the lam. He calls Dr. Deeply to come get Zuniga, but before the Doc shows up Zuniga identifies Brock Vond as the source of Zoyd's cop problems. Zuniga says he wants Frenesi to make a movie. The Doc arrives and takes Zuniga away. Zoyd and Prairie talk in bed (in a borrowed camper) about Frenesi. Zoyd mentions "a deal." Prairie goes off with Isaiah.
and a Moonpie." p. 37 "Beer riders" A nice conceit, typically Pynchonian: kamikaze rednecks racing through the tule fog. p. 37 "behind a 409" 409 = a big V8 motor. p. 37 "white presences, full of blindness and sudden highway death..." Echoes the "white visitation" of Gravity's Rainbow, as well as Melville's whiteness of the whale. Also a pungent evocation of graveworms: There's more death in this phrase than meets the eye, foreshadowing the Thanatoids. p. 37 "...all at once, there in the road, a critter in a movie..." A Japanese horror movie, no doubt! (See note, p. 65.) p. 39 "Can love save anyone?" "Save" is Calvinist/Christian terminology -- another reference to the binary distinction between elect and preterite, one and zero. p. 40 "Mr. Sulu" The navigator on Star Trek. p. 41 "The Steam Donkey" A bar named after the logger's mechanical badass winch. p. 41 "...she rilly freaked when she found out she was pregnant" As we'll see in the final chapter, Vond's last escapade is mostly an attempt to abduct Prairie. So the paranoid reader might ask: Is Frenesi merely a convenient mechanism to set up all of the important stuff in the book? Or is she simply Patty Hearst in reverse? p. 42 "...time to go to commercials..." Zoyd remembers expecting life to be like TV -- a dangerous side- effect of TV addiction. The passage goes on to note that Zoyd was "Sent...gaga by those mythical days of high drama..."
Cheese.
p. 43 "Humbolaya Restaurant" = Humboldt County + Jambalaya (with tofu etouffe, yet!). p. 43 "After a short recorded program of themes from famous TV shows..." The telephone "hold" circuit at NEVER plays TV themes, which is like calling Alcoholics Anonymous and getting a medley of "One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer" and "Hey Bartender." But of course, the "VE does stand for "Video Education"... p. 43 "'Ti Bruce" 'Ti = Creole/Cajun shorthand for petit = little, hence Ti Bruce = Little Bruce. Can chef 'Ti Bruce be a gag on Bay Area chef and sausage-maker "Big Bruce" Aidells? Seems unlikely...but you never know.
some vehicle's provenance. p. 45 "another one of those intestinal pangs" of fear. See also p. 10, 116, 207, 299. p. 45 "the slowest fast food in the region" Hilarious riff on trendy California health-food pizza. p. 46 "The Marquis de Sod." Hazardously funny. p. 47 "those old split 30's during the vampire shift" TV ad lingo, referring to 15-second TV spots (splitting a 30-second commercial break) often on in the wee hours. Vampire shift is a Pynchon usage, we think; more common is "graveyard shift."
Bad, bad Pynchon. p. 48. "Pat Sajak in The Frank Gorshin Story" Gorshin was a hollow-eyed comedian and TV celeb from the late fifties, sort of a cross between Dan Duryea and Richard Widmark. p. 50 "Brock Vond" Another badass "V." Pynchon has a long-standing history of bad guys whose names start with "V." In this case, as we will see, the V stands for Vampire as well as Villain. p. 52 "Baba Havabananda" = have a banana. Groucho Marx meets Swami Satchidananda at R. Crumb's? p. 55 "like a time machine departing for the future..." Fine writing.
CHAPTER 5
The Japanese amulet. Flashback to Zoyd's flight to Hawaii (on Kahuna Airlines) in pursuit of Frenesi -- who, we discover, had left Zoyd for Brock Vond. We meet Frenesi's mother Sasha, a long-time leftist. In Hawaii, Zoyd tries to win back Frenesi, but she's not interested. In a flashback, we get more exposition on Sasha. Back in Hawaii, Zoyd gets a gig playing keyboards on Kahuna Airlines flights. There's a weird "Martian" hijack. Zoyd saves a mysterious Japanese businessman, Takeshi Fumimoto, who gives him a magic "talisman" business card: the same amulet that began the chapter.
"The Big Kahuna."
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