4. The representation of television in Vineland

Similar to "Little Expressionless Animals" and White Noise, Thomas Pynchon's fourth novel Vineland is saturated with references to commercial television. Some reference is made to news and political broadcasts like "The MacNeil-Lehrer News Hour",(104) the Watergate hearings (p. 72), and "60 Minutes" (p. 373), but mostly purely entertaining and banal shows like "Jeopardy" are mentioned.(105) There are also references to invented shows, especially the "Babies of Wackiness" (cf. p. 159-161) and a series of docudramas whose comic effect lies in the intermingling of seemingly incompatible elements and characters. Who would not want to see Pee-Wee Herman in "The Robert Musil Story"?(106)

This referential barrage of televisual trivia is accompanied by the representation of acts surrounding the TV set. Characters fall asleep in front of the tube (p. 234), they smoke dope (p. 21, 59), watch without sound (p. 21, 141), have sex in its flickering light (p. 212), listen to the radio (p. 197, 270), and even watch it while driving (p. 335). In Vineland, just like in White Noise, the TV set appears not only as a device enabling public interface but as an apparatus deeply implemented in the private realm of individuals and families. It is represented not as a medium outside the subject and its immediate surroundings but as one at the heart of it. While in Wallace and DeLillo the TV "speaks" and "asks", in Vineland it keeps company (p. 335, 141), wards off loneliness (p. 59) and functions as an instigator and mediator of sexual fantasies (p. 59, 83, 278).

Brian McHale considers Pynchon a realist because he grounds the various allusions and references to TV in the diegetical act of television-watching and thus the most time consuming pastime for Americans.(107) This is exactly the realism that Wallace demands of image-fiction: instead of being simply an allusional reference point outside the diegetical realm, the TV set is placed in the middle of the characters' universe, shaping the way they perceive the world and themselves. In Vineland television is not an entertainment source but "has come to pervade our lives in more profound ways, shaping and constraining our desires, our behavior, and our expectations about others."(108)

The familiarity with television displayed by most characters should not only be understood as a familiarity with its contents. The relationship is of a more literal nature, whereby the set can be involved in an intimate, sexual and emotional way as if it were a family member. It is in the private sphere (thereby significantly changing the notion of privacy itself) where TV unfolds its deepest and most disturbing effects. White Noise, which often has been called a domestic novel, concentrated on the Gladney family as the focal point in the representation of TV's effects. Similarly, "in Vineland the strongest resonances center on the family."(109) Vineland's plot centers around Prairie's quest for her mother Frenesi. Familial ties and emotions thus fuel the narrative. And like White Noise, Vineland shows the family to be in a state of dissolution, invaded not just by the media but also more sinister forces of the state.

Critically acclaimed as one of the most important writers of this century, Pynchon has produced many influential works including Gravity's Rainbow, which is considered as the postmodern novel par excellence. After 16 years of silence,(110) something as complicated and convoluted as Finnegan's Wake was expected to be the creative outcome of such a prolonged period of research and revisions. What finally ended up in the sweaty palms of Pynchonites all over the world was a disappointment for many reviewers: Vineland offers a rather straightforward tale which resembles an MTV-spot more than a complicated novel. Instead of being concerned with existential questions, it centers around a rather sentimental family story.

The analysis of the critical reception of Vineland is well worth another master's thesis, as it clearly shows how the academical canon with all it's definitions and preconceptions works. When confronted with elements which do not fit into this canon, the critic is at a loss. What is he to make of a work completely immersed in the contemporary world with all its trivia and televisual chatter? How can he deal with a postmodern writer whose newest novel lacks most of the classical postmodern features? The confusion displayed by many reviewers of the novel indicates its hybrid nature. It is a work of "high" art suffused with allusions to the "lowest" forms of entertainment; it is a postmodern novel but at the same time rather linear and realistic, even a bestseller; it is playful but at the same time very political.

The main problem critics had with the book concerns its representation of television. David Cowart speaks of the "depressing litany"(111) of TV-references, Brian McHale asks if "Pynchon has fatally compromised his candidacy for canonical status by writing such a TV-saturated novel."(112) The mere representation of TV is perceived as "low" art by these critics. TV is frowned upon as something outside the range of serious literature and art in general. They therefore belong to those kind of academics who, according to David Foster Wallace, participate in "this well-known critical litany about television's vapidity, shallowness, and irrealism."(113) These critics have not spent their "whole conscious lives being part of TV's audience," and therefore view it as a cultural other, something utterly opposed to literature and its concerns.

The publication of Vineland made thus visible an interesting generational conflict concerning the representation of TV, a conflict which is mirrored in the novel itself. Isaiah Two Four, a kid grown up with TV, explains to Zoyd Wheeler why the generation of the rebellious sixties failed:

Whole problem 'th you folks's generation, [...] is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it ? but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube. Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like the Indians, sold it all to your real enemies [...]. (p. 373)