4.1.1 Formal boundary crossings: 
Vineland's narrative flow

The concept of "flow" dates back to the cultural critic Raymond Williams who described it as one of television's defining features.(115) He discerns previous entertainment forms (books, movies, sports-events) as being items perceived as discrete, whereas TV's offerings are available "in a single dimension and a single operation."(116) In the beginning, TV programs similarly consisted of discrete units which were separated by clearly demarkated breaks (logos, stills, blanks). As the industry expanded, the programs became a series of timed units. According to Williams, the decisive shift to a "flowing" programming was due to the rising importance of commercial advertising. As commercials began to replace intervals, items which were previously considered distinct became connected. The more the commercial interruptions became part of the program, the less they were perceived as foreign elements. Finally, "What is being offered is [...] a planned flow, in which the true series is not the published sequence of programme items but this sequence transformed by the inclusion of another kind of sequence, so that these sequences together compose the real flow [...]."(117)

Williams illustrates the way in which this planned flow affects the viewing experience with his own first encounter with "the characteristic American sequence":

I began watching a film and at first had some difficulty in adjusting to a much greater frequency of commercial "breaks". [...] Two other films, which were due to be shown on the same channel on other nights, began to be inserted as trailers. A crime in San Francisco (the subject of the original film) began to operate in an extraordinary counterpoint not only with the deodorant and cereal commercials but with a romance in Paris and the eruption of a prehistoric monster who laid waste to New York.(118)

In her essay "Television and Recent American Fiction", Cecilia Tichi acknowledges the importance of Williams' concept of flow for the understanding of "TV-age fiction".(119) Tichi discerns as one instance of flowing structures in fiction the disruption "of the beginning-middle-end structure. Flow enables entry at any point. The narrative of flow is continuous, open, apparantly without end."(120) This sounds like a description of the structure of "Little Expressionless Animals" which, according to David Foster Wallace, readers often want to see "as mimicking TV's own pace and phosphenic flutter." In addition, Wallace's story is written in the present tense, "the tense that best enacts the experience of flow and the primacy of the present moment within it."(121)

Vineland itself is clearly an example of what Tichi calls "TV-age fiction". Various critics have remarked upon its narrative flow which resembles a TV program: "Der [Text] ist selbst wie eine Fernsehserie (mit Spielfilm-Einlagen) strukturiert ? allerdings aus einer ganzen Ansammlung von Gattungen."(122) According to Martin Klepper, the text comments upon its own principle of composition in the description of the "Noir Center" which was "loosely based on crime movies from around World War II [...]. Noir Center here had an upscale mineral-water boutique called Bubble Indemnity, plus The Lounge Good Buy patio furniture outlet, The Mall Tease Flacon, which sold perfume and cosmetics, and a New York-style deli, The Lady 'n' the Lox." (p. 326) In this temple of consumption images and phrases from film noir are completely decontextualized and organized into a kind of flow, a disparate universe of noir-ish bits and pieces. This flow does not allow for the recognition of the underlying historical complexities and struggles which occured at the time these movies were made. Since the reader is already informed of these political struggles through the history of Sasha and Hub Gates (who in the forties worked in Hollywood and later confronted Ronald Reagan as head of the reactionary Actor's Guild), he is able to recognize the flipside of this flow. The fragmentation of complex historical eras into bits and pieces along with their arrangement into a pleasant flow leads to the erasure of the past and becomes only another incentive for consumption.

In a similar vein as Klepper, Brian McHale states that "the very world of Vineland, the outside 'real world' existing independently of any particular character's consciousness of it, is itself modeled on TV."(123) He perceives that the world of Vineland is partitioned into various "regions" and associated with certain televisual genres which again are grouped around certain characters in the novel. So whenever Zoyd Wheeler is the center of the fictional world, this world seems to function according to sitcom-logic, Brock Vond transforms everything around him into a cop-show, and Frenesi and Flash live under soap opera circumstances. Each genre-world functions with a different set of psychological, sometimes even physical laws and norms. McHale's metaphor for the rapid and often imperceptible switching between these worlds is zapping.

For McHale, zapping allows for a "heightened, intensified flow."(124) In Vineland, the only character who actually zaps is Takeshi Fumimota. One night, "He [...] put on the air-conditioner and the Tube, hit the Search button on the remote, and lay watching the channels crank by, two seconds apiece." (p. 160) This scene has the same function for McHale as the Noir Center had for Klepper, namely to make the reader aware of the overall "flow"-structure of the book: "Takeshi [...] orients us toward what is in some sense Vineland's center of gravity, not only its primary device of ontological pluralization but the very model of its plurality ? the Tube."(125) Where Klepper connects the novel's reflexion of its own flickering structure to political insights, McHale stays safely inside the literary realm. For him, television as an "ontological pluralizer" mirrors the ontological pluralization of the novel itself. He does not understand the novel to be a commentary on television and its implications, but rather the opposite. TV figures only as a commentary upon the novel. For McHale, instead of delivering any social or political insights, Vineland only fulfills the main task of postmodern literature: it represents "a multiple-world space, a heterotopia, or 'zone'."(126)

What distinguishes Vineland from "Little Expressionless Animals" and White Noise is precisely the "ontological pluralization" of its world(s). Wallace's story is marked by many cuts and chronological jumps, but it nevertheless depicts a single universe subject to stable laws. Although it presents a linear story, White Noise can also be understood as a kind of flow uniting distinct bits and pieces. The perceptions of Jack Gladney resemble a kind of internal zapping which depends on sights he confronts. Jack's cognitive process swiftly jumps from one media representation to the next, combining sitcoms, A&T-commercials, Norse legends, crime movies featuring adultery, murder and other representations. But this "epistemological zapping" occurs exclusively in the head of the main protagonist, whereas in Vineland not only the perceptions of certain figures change but the rules of the world itself. Pynchon seems to be less interested in perceptual changes due to television than in changes within the world itself.