4.1 Boundary crossings: 
Vineland's formal and ontological "flow"

Insofar as that it does not seem to fit into any of the critics' literary categories, Vineland can be said to be a novel which crosses boundaries, between "high" and "low" art, between postmodern and realist literature. This composite status is also mirrored in the novel's narrative form which resembles the flow of TV: "Television is represented not only substantively in Vineland, it also provides the narrative model. [...] Vineland imitates the form of a television programme."(114) This form juxtaposes completely disjunctive genres like soap-operas, cop-shows and cartoons without indicating their boundaries. The second form of boundary crossing occuring in Vineland can be called an ontological one. It concerns the TV screen as a boundary line through which subjects define their own existence. Like in "Little Expressionless Animals" and in White Noise, the TV screen in Vineland is a permeable boundary: not only are "real-life" figures televised, but televisual entities invade real life. The screen is also treated as an existential boundary, it denotes the line between life and death. Like Babette, who becomes a "walker in the mists of the dead" on TV, so too does Frenesi appear to Prairie as "dead but in a special way, a minimum security arrangement, where limited visits, mediated by projector and screen, were possible." (p. 199) The spilling over of the televisual into the real world and vice versa thus appears as one of the main concerns of image-fiction. TV does not function as a sealed-off space with no pertinence to reality, but as the main disseminator of what people nowadays perceive as real.