4.2.2 Television and Trauma

The narrative present represented in Vineland is marked by passivity, government control and political reaction. Vineland itself is accociated with a

pacified territory ? reclaimed by the enemy for a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie. (p. 221/222)

Almost nothing is left of the revolutionary aspirations of the sixties, "the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television." (p. 38) As the capital letters indicate ("Mellow Sixties"), this idealized version of the recent past has been turned into a cliché similar to the forties in the "Noir Center". Pynchon attempts to destroy this harmonic myth of the sixties ("the kind to be seen on 'sensitivity' greeting cards in another few years", p. 38). By showing that the politics of image production and corruption associated with TV were already at work in the past the notion of a revolutionary paradise lost is subverted. The failure of 24fps is that they believed in objective images with revolutionary potentials, "but [...] sure didn't understand much about the Tube" (p. 373), as Isaiah Two Four puts it.

Mucho Maas, ex-husband of The Crying of Lot 49's heroine Oedipa and embodiment of the counter-culture of the sixties, becomes in Vineland's present a well-off member of the establishment. He even abstains from drugs! He offers a critique of television which nevertheless does not keep him from viewing: "They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for [...]." (p. 314) There are many instances in the novel praising the value of the attention span: 24fps' program includes "learning how to pay attention" (p. 195); for political reasons, Frenesi must pay attention to movie credits (p. 81/82); and learning the discipline of the Kunoichi Attentives "takes a serious attention span" (p. 112). Even more important is Mucho's insight that television allows one to forget. I suggest that it is precisely this TV-induced oblivion that Vineland tries to counter.

Most of the characters in the novel who witnessed the sixties are caught up in an endless circle of repetitions. Caught in a timeless zone, they are unable to reconnect with their pasts: Zoyd annually jumps through plate-glass windows, Frenesi submits herself to ever shadier jobs for the state, Brock Vond compulsively sleeps with women, and almost everyone, especially the Thanatoids, is addicted to TV. These repetitions remind one of Freud's concept of the compulsion to repeat which can often be witnessed in traumatized persons.(136) As is very obvious in Zoyd's and Frenesi's repetitive actions, both are unpleasant (they are degrading), and they repeat an initial traumatic event which neither of them has been able to work through. The trauma in Zoyd's case is the loss of his wife Frenesi and the accompanying humiliation from Brock Vond, in Frenesi's case it is her submission to Brock and ensuing betrayal of the revolution. The Thanatoids also appear as traumatized persons, "victims of Karmic imbalances ? unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering, escapes by the guilty." (p. 173)

The Thanatoids are unable to deal with their past or redeem their suffering because that would mean a departure from the pain-free realm of television. Working for the government, Frenesi is said to understand "her particular servitude as the freedom, granted to a few, to act outside warrants and charters, to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future, no yet-to-be-born, to be able simply to go on defining moments only, purely, by the action that filled them." (p. 71/72) Zoyd also lives only in the present, a state of being made possible mainly through television. Confronted with the threat of Brock Vond and Hector Zuñiga, who represent "Schattengeschöpfe einer Wiederholung von Ereignissen [...], Beispiele fast einer personifizierten Freudschen Nachträglichkeit,"(137) Zoyd, "like all suffering Tubeheads [...] must have really thought, as he and the baby were making their getaway, that that was it, [...] time to go to the commercials and clips of next week's episode." (p. 42)

Television in Vineland thus appears to be a medium which does not allow for a working-through of the past, it captures the viewer in a timeless zone were no real experiences are possible. According to Mary Ann Doane, televisual images only denote a presentness, a "This-is-going-on", a "celebration of the instantaneous."(138) The only memories TV does allow for are "memories of TV in an endless chain of TV referentiality."(139) As Patricia Mellencamp writes, "TV schedules memories of television [...], resulting in an atrophy of experience."(140) Because of this "atrophy of experience", television cannot function as a medium for the working-through of personal traumas.

"Wo Erfahrung im strikten Sinne obwaltet, treten im Gedächtnis gewisse Inhalte der individuellen Vergangenheit mit solchen der kollektiven in Konjunktion."(141) The connection of the personal with the collective past that Walter Benjamin speaks of is central to Vineland. Prairie's search for her mother Frenesi and a highly individual past is deeply entwined with the reconstruction of a collective past, i.e. the sixties. TV does not allow for the reconstruction of a collective past through the recovery of an individual one, since it seals off the subject from individual experiences.(142) Instead of highly particular and individual moments, the tube constantly repeats stereotypical versions of the past belonging to no-one in particular: "Instead of experience and memory, television's past, whether funny or not, evokes laughter and distance; it is [...] out of synch with the present, with nothing, now, to do with us [...]."(143)

If the novel is seen as a working-through of the traumatic sixties mediated through Prairie's search for her mother, then the death of Weed Atman can be understood as a synecdoche for this trauma. At its core, trauma designates a violent event which overpowers the perceptual/representational faculties of the subject to such an extent that he cannot master it.(144) The impossibility of capturing the traumatic event in its reality is carefully shown in Pynchon's rendering of the Weed Atman shooting. Before he is shot, Weed "had just time enough to say Frenesi's name before the frame went twisting and flying off his face." The cameraman Howie "missed the actual moment [of the shot, V. H.], although shapes may have moved somewhere in the frame, black on black." (p. 246)

According to Hanjo Berressem, "Through this repression and exclusion, Weed's death becomes an allegory of the impossibility and unrepresentability of the historical trauma itself."(145) Pynchon relates the "traumatic cut in the fabric of reality to the filmic cut."(146) The traumatic event (the shot) is never spoken of directly, rather only in terms of frames which mediate and enframe the real. Lacan describes the locus of the unconscious in similar cinematic terms: "Whereas the parts of the real image [...] can never be seen, those places where the apparatus seizes up, where it blocks up [...] that is the unconscious."(147) The traumatic death of Weed Atman can thus be understood as the historical unconscious which governs the consciousness of the subjects in the present without them being able to fully confront it. All the "survivors" of the sixties (Frenesi, Zoyd, Flash, Mucho, Brock) undergo a "missed encounter with the real,"(148) which leads to their compulsion to repeat this trauma, i.e. to re-live again and again the humiliation of their failure.

The compulsion to repeat an initially traumatic event is most obvious in Zoyd's annual "transfenestrations". Brock Vond humiliated Zoyd by taking away his wife and turning her into a government snitch. Additionally, he made a deal with Zoyd: by making him dependent on the mental-disability checks received for his stunts he keeps abreast of his whereabouts. Just as the death of Weed Atman can be read in a metaphorical way as the trauma of a whole generation, so too can Zoyd's jumps be said to represent the "symbolic neurosis" of his generation: "Zoyds Wiederholungszwang [ist] kein Symptom im Sinne Freuds. Statt dessen ist er ein gesellschaftlich symbolisches, künstlich inszeniertes Symptom, das ihm sein intimer Erzfeind aufgezwungen hat [...]."(149)

Zoyd's compulsion to repeat, resulting in his submission to Brock Vond and the government, is deeply connected with television. The presentation of Zoyd's jump on TV shows how this medium turns an experience with the potential for real change into a mere act; easily consumable, familiar and unthreatening. The set up and the broadcast rob the jump of all its psychological and historical complexities: "Die Vernichtung von Tiefe bedeutet in Zoyds Fall die völlige Beseitigung des Hintergrunds, der Ursachen für seine Akte."(150) Thus, the annual jump exemplifies why TV works as an annihilator "of memory, and consequently of history."(151)

Zoyd's annual jump through a plate-glass window is supposed to be a crazy act, something completely idiosyncratic, unfamiliar and out of control. The reader is presented instead with the complete opposite of craziness: an act which is constantly repeated (annually and in slow-motion, thereby taking away its disrupting qualities), completely familiar to many viewers and thoroughly controlled by the media.

Perhaps the first of Zoyd's jumps was indeed a crazy act, but his latest one is a mere simulation of a real event. Zoyd appears as nothing more than an outragous performer. The costume he wears is not chosen because it befits his own manic desires but because it "would look good on television." (p. 4) All spontaneity is eliminated in the deed. Zoyd even has to follow the cameras instead of the other way around. Also, the Cucumber Lounge has been turned into a virtual space, as is made obvious with Pynchon's pun: "At last all was set." (p. 11)

So much "set", indeed, that even the plate-glass window has been replaced with clear sheet candy: "He knew the instant he hit that something was funny. There was hardly any impact, and it all felt and sounded different, no spring or resonance, no volume, only a sort of fine, dulled splintering." (p. 11/12) The replacement of the glass is only one further step in reducing the "crazy" act into a pseudo-event, controlled and lacking in any threat of potential danger. The familiarizing and pacifying tendency of television is further underscored by the commentaries of a panel, "including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track-and-field coach live and remote from the Olympics down in L.A. discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd's technique [...]." (p. 15) Together with the constant repetitions in slow motion, which only serve to emphasize the visual qualities of the jump, these commentaries alleviate the disturbing qualities of the act. It becomes something thoroughly controllable through language and images, based on a certain "technique" which others can imitate.

Delivered into the living-rooms is thus only a simulacrum of a painful jump which has no disturbing effect upon the viewers. The jump is essentially edited out of its original disquieting context. TV is the "preeminent machine of decontextualization"(152) because it is structured and perceived as a discontinuous flow (cf. chapter 4.1.1). In order to have a real experience, the viewer needs to be shocked or at least disturbed, i.e. some kind of perceivable continuity must be disrupted. TV allocates no time or space for such a disruption, as it is constructed of nothing but little modulated shocks; just enough to keep the audience entertained, too little to really disturb.

When truly disturbing catastrophes do occur and disrupt the ordinary TV program, the events are compulsively repeated. Patricia Mellencamp mentions the Zapruder movie of Kennedy's assassination and the footage of the exploding Challenger capsule as examples of television's compulsion to repeat.(153) Similar to Zoyd's crazy stunt, each further repetition turns the event into a mere optical spectacle which seems under control so as long as it is constantly repeated. The repetition generates a feeling of continuity and control when a violent split has occurred: "Dadurch werden die Schreckensminuten zur Fiktion und können bewältigt werden."(154) With its inability to provide context (i.e. to represent events in their whole historical complexity) and its compulsion to repeat "verhält sich [TV] wie die Opfer der traumatischen Neurose, die Sigmund Freud als Beispiel zur Beschreibung des Wiederholungszwanges [...] verwendet."(155) The event which is not fully confronted but only repeated on TV is obliterated. It is no coincidence that Zoyd's jump is rerun on Channel 86 (to get "86ed" is an American slang expression for being eradiacted).

Only in the context of trauma can the political implications of TV fully emerge. Television keeps its viewers in a painfree, timeless zone where it is impossible to confront the past and work through it. Prairie is able to reconnect with the past, her own personal one and the collective history of a whole generation. This is not achieved through television though, but through personal involvement (with Takeshi, D.L. Chastain, the Kunoichi Attentives, Ditzah and her father, Zoyd) and the help of pre-televisual media which allow for the recognition of an underlying subjectivity. Prairie is the "Medium [...], mit dem Zoyds Generation aufgeweckt wird."(156) Finally, "trifft Prairie [...] ihre Mutter und erfährt von ihrem historischen Verrat. Dies führt nicht zu irgendeiner letztem Wahrheit, aber es beendet den Teufelskreis von Wiederholungen [...]."(157)