Dara Waldron (Limerick Institute of Technology)
Returning to an all American setting for his long awaited comeback political novel Vineland, Thomas Pynchon encountered an ambivalent response. Far too engaged with the present to warrant a ‘critical’ re-imagination of the future, the novel was said to envisage 80s America as ‘politically’ inebriated by the inflection of media spectacles. Critically then the novel was neither this nor that. By addressing the manner in which Pynchon posits the media, largely through television – what Pynchon refers to as the Tube – as helping to transfigure the political into the commodified aesthetic this paper examines the way in which the novel specifically comments on the televisual ‘spectacle’ – reading the novel in the context of hysteria, democracy and what Joan Copjec refers to a the ‘”realist imbecility” that television ends up exposing” (Copjec: 1994; 141). Considered then as a ‘political novel’ with its hysterical emphasis on big brotherly control (television), the second section of this paper addresses the ‘political’ author and author-function. Looking at Pynchon’s introduction to a recent edition of George Orwell’s dystopian/ utopian 1984, against the backdrop of his own described alternative communities, while accounting for the half dead media thanatoids in Vineland (against the backdrop of Pynchon’s own contribution to television: his recent ‘appearance’ on an episode of The Simpsons) a further deliberation on the author’s own subjection to the very power-structures he describes: television, and the implications of this for his political aesthetic, is offered.