Thomas Pynchon's Vineland
Hendin, Josephine
VINELAND, by Thomas Pynchon. Little, Brown & Company, 1990. 385 pp. $19.95. Vineland is a requiem for Pynchon's sixties generation and the politics and culture it produced. It offers an America...
...In the sixties a group of insurgent students starts a protest at the College of the Surf in what they believe should be an endless Summer of Love orchestrated by the People's Republic of Rock and Roll...
...Self-images now derive from sit-coms, and the screens we watch seem to watch us if only because of the standardization of personality: you are what you watch...
...Zoyd has raised Prairie in Vineland, a northern California forest town redolent of an earlier wilderness of untouched spaces but now encroached on by LSD devotees, marijuana growers, cable television, developers who know forests were "born to be suburbs," and the Drug Enforcement Agency...
...and Zoyd, whom she abandons...
...Each group feels betrayed in an America in which no ideology, no conviction, and no politics really matter anymore...
...In the sixties a turncoat named Rex killed Weed...
...Fear of an emerging police state or the exercise of power has been obsolesced by the distortions of the cop show in which the audience cheers on the Dirty Harrys who routinely trample the constitution...
...One protester is our "heroine," Frenesi, a radical filmmaker who sees the camera as a gun and filming injustice as an attack on it...
...Drawing on imagery from computer graphics, Pynchon sees people as pixels (dots) on a screen grid, alternatively visible or invisible, substantial or ghostly in a soulless display...
...Pynchon's emblematic sixties woman prefers silicon life to humanity with its fleshy, carbon-based predilection for childbearing and nurturing...
...the medium is the only message that counts...
...The character types are familiarly Pynchonesque: the proto-fascist Prosecutor is a pale reflection of the V-2 engineer Weissman of Gravity's Rainbow, and Frenesi, arch-betrayer, sought by Brock, Zoyd, and her daughter, recalls the double agent Katje of Gravity's Rainbow or the absent maternal force in V. As V. functioned as the "mother" of the twentieth century, so Frenesi epitomizes an experimentation with violence, obsession with power, role playing, and treachery that may make her Pynchon's spirit of the past twenty years...
...Like V., who is imagined in V. as an autoerotic machine with perfect plastic skin, Frenesi is a filmmaker who is an adventuress in celluloid...
...Only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all...
...The tenets of an older radicalism and the conservative belief in freedom tempered by order have since been ground up in photo-ops, cover-ups applied like makeup and insubstantial political clichés...
...She becomes involved with three men who represent three common sixties paths toward self-transcendence: Weed, the intellectual she helps kill...
...A product of pop culture and populism, she has become the kind of collaborator her parents despised...
...He is her erotic videogame...
...The country seems to have neither states nor states of mind but is divided into "Cable Zones which in time became political units in their own right as the Tubal entrepreneurs went extending their webs...
...Is she the new Thoreau...
...Yet his once "holy" insanity has been debased to entertainment...
...His gift is for "transfenestration," going through windows out of the current world into the memory of the Indian-haunted forest, into love for his daughter, and into a perspective in which it is possible to tell the difference between having and losing your spirit...
...Antidrug activism was, like all else in the novel, only a show...
...No other novel has so pitilessly taken for its subject the course and shape of recent history or so provocatively implied that the establishment and counterculture have served as unwitting collaborators in the destruction of an old American faith in freedom, merit, and substance...
...Frenesi marries Zoyd Wheeler, a loving doper, to find refuge from Brock...
...There the drama of the sixties and the eighties is supposed to erupt in a violent battle in the War on Drugs and in the rough confrontation of Brock, Zoyd, Frenesi, and Prairie...
...As one child of sixties flower children points out to his parents' friends: "You sure didn't understand much about the Tube...
...Pynchon uses the War on Drugs as a media blitzkrieg concealing in deceptive images the terrible sameness of the establishment and counterculture...
...The establishment drugs, such as thorazine and alcohol, help defeat memory...
...This is the computerized world in which every time you use a bank or credit card your needs are gratified, even as your whereabouts can be clocked...
...Her attraction to Brock is to his ability to stage pleasure shows in motel rooms...
...Brock, whose life she tries to emulate...
...Brock the Prosecutor, armed with helicopters, marijuana defoliants, and Civil RICO (Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, which allows seizures in civil cases), leads an attack against the peaceful misfits of the town...
...For her, computer-generated "life" offers the illusion of immortality, just as computergenerated FBI checks become her energy source as an informant...
...He survives on mental-disability checks hilariously reearned each year by jumping through barroom windows for network news...
...Now Time had claimed her again, put her under house arrest, taken her passport away...
...Now middle aged, they discover the establishment is also in the drug business...
...The staple of the counterculture was the drug that stood for a politics of ecstasy, a platform outside the confines even of mortality...
...Whether on the left or right, we are, for Pynchon, all guilty of having been utterly lulled by it...
...Atman's death provokes the violent retaking of the campus and, ironically, the beginning of the end of the old politics of confrontation...
...Pynchon's concern is the evolution of a betrayal: how the spirit of the sixties turned from opposition to collaboration...
...276 • DISSENT Books The surviving sixties male is represented by Zoyd, a passionate old doper who loves Prairie and junk food...
...In revolt against biology, she looks like a woman but behaves like a computerized image...
...Pynchon's holdouts against the establishment are dopers like Zoyd, who farm marijuana and dream of the sixties when LSD enabled them to believe that they would never die...
...When a daughter named Prairie, fathered either by Zoyd or by Brock, is born, Frenesi abandons all three to work independently for the FBI...
...For Pynchon the betrayal began accidentally when the sixties radicals who used media coverage as the tool of revolution unwittingly eroded the differences between acting and activism...
...Frenesi found bearing a child an encounter with death, feeling descent to cold regions of hatred for the tiny life, raw, parasitic, using her body through the wearying months and now still looking to control her . . . . She had been privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and manipulating, weightless, invisible...
...The Feds use Civil RICO statutes to run the enforcement mechanisms on the proceeds of crime...
...The symbol of microchipped America is the "new" woman...
...What has changed from SPRING • 1990 • 275 Books Pynchon's earlier work is the softer pitch of his tension and overt rage...
...in the eighties, Rex 84 is Pynchon's version of a turncoat national mission: to reelect Reagan, King of the Tube...
...Pynchon's warriors of the left and right find themselves obsolesced, enervated by an attrition of differences...
...Pynchon ends his novel with what has been hailed as an image of optimism: Prairie, alone and safe in the woods, is licked awake by her dog...
...Bisexual, she is determined not to be bored or ground down in the usual female trap of motherhood...
...his life as Prosecutor the power game she can play "just for the score...
...Frenesi is not so much a person as a representative of the spirit of "progress" as a California girl...
...Adding to the town are Thanatoids, the shadows of men who fought in Vietnam and who came back in a half-life, and the ghosts of Weed and others who have been betrayed and seek "Karmic readjustment...
...RICO seizures of assets before trial undermine due process presumptions of innocence before guilt is proved...
...The deforested future belongs to eighties youth: Prairie and her boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four, who was named by his flower-power parents for the biblical passage exhorting the transformation of swords into ploughshares...
...In addition to the major lines of the plot, it offers dozens of hilarious side glimpses into California cults, Americanized Zen communes, and a host of minor characters worth volumes in their own right...
...Even Thanatoid Ghosts like Weed, who come to the Karmology Clinic, have lost the drive to settle scores with those who betrayed them...
...But an affair with an FBI prosecutor, Brock, introduces Frenesi to the sexiness of a gun and induces her to help murder a radical young math professor whose name, Weed Atman (Marijuana Soul), suggests his perpetual high...
...Or is Pynchon borrowing for a future America Harry Truman's advice to those looking for a friend: "Go buy a dog...
...For Pynchon the War on Drugs is not only taxation by another name but an attempt to substitute controlled substances for drugs like LSD that induced illusions of limitless freedom...
...In this McLuhanatic novel, the major force for both reaction and revolution seems to be electronics technology...
...SPRING • 1990 • 277...
...This California novel, plotted as a love triangle and a tale of generations, opens up an America you might call Filmclip Nation...
...And yet it is also the saddest in its exploration of how the nation lost the capacity to perceive or care about political and moral truth...
...On the verge of success, about to abduct Prairie, Brock's helicopter is recalled because Reagan has withdrawn funding for the drug raids...
...But wait...
...the Tube has become the approved opiate of the People under the aegis of the president who is its greatest pusher-addict...
...Rollickingly surreal, filled with wackily named characters, and boasting a plot more complicated than an Italian opera, Vineland only seems like a vacation from high seriousness...
...In effect the slogan Drug Free America and the belief that Drugs Free America are flip sides of the same use of drugs as a control mechanism...
...Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it...
...No one any longer cares what is right or true...
...It offers an America of those who have searched for self-transcendence along opposing ideological paths: the yearners for power and position who in the eighties find themselves Reaganites and the pacifist politicoes of ecstasy who, searching for deathlessness, found middle age...
...The culture of information has displaced the need for a literal FBI even as the use of video technology has so softened political discourse as to neutralize differences...
...And yet the very quest for spiritual freedom and immortal youth may have helped turn the youth culture into collaborators...
...In that videogame world, issues shift like moving images and all that counts is the Big Picture...
...Optimistic or not, Vineland is a dazzling work...
...Even LSD has given way to Liquid Crystal Displays...
...Although it does not equal Gravity's Rainbow or V. for sheer brilliance of conception, it bears the mark of Pynchon's unique and troubled genius...
...The culminating action of the novel involves a battle that isn't...
...It is 1984 and the national mission is Rex 84—the reelection of the president who believes that trees cause pollution...
...One would have to conclude from this novel that the family is the umbilicus of cable and electronic connection, both conduits of the larger culture of information in which surveillance and consumption intertwine...
...While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds, and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw . . . the need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family...
...His penis had become the joystick with which, hurtling into the future, she would try to steer . . . [into] underground time . . . that could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless perimeter...
...Named after a fifties pop song by her Hollywood leftist parents, she was a red-diaper baby raised with a sense of social responsibility...
...Virtually every reviewer has called this Pynchon's most optimistic novel...
...Isaiah Two Four is a young man with business plans: he wants to develop violence theme parks for family fun featuring "Third World Thrills, a jungle obstacle course where you got to . . . blast away at surprise pop-up targets shaped like indigenous guerrilla elements...
...Be they ghosts, old dopers for whom drugs no longer work, discarded informants, Prosecutors, or Tube addicts in need of "tubaldetoxification units," the survivors of the sixties come through as dispirited, burnt-out cases...
...Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap...
...Wildly imaginative, witty, and sad, its ebullient writing discloses yet a new dispiritedness...
Vol. 37 • April 1990 • No. 2
