Political Pot

[Terrance]

This list is dead, if this Law Review can't get them up,
stir the political pot, well, maybe only a  new Pynchon
novel can generate interest. 

In your essay, you identify several keys, literary allusion
that resonate political/satire, i.e. 1984, Carpenter
Gothic, etc., names i.e. Wheeler, Fletcher, Vond, Frenesi,
Prairie, Desmond, Lemay/Wallace, Zuniga, and so on, the idea
of a Zoyd/Sperm 
is cool,  but I think the essay is something between the
beginnings of a
Hollander Companion to VL and a critical study of Pynchon's
literary techniques and politics--how to read Pynchon,
justify a 
subtextual reading of Pynchon's political focus. 



Spencer says, 

However, to regard I.G. Farben as simply a metaphorical
construct, or to categorically reject the presence or the
"They"-system, is both to deny the complexity of the
relationship between the historical and the fictional in GR,
and to ignore one of the key interpretive issues within the
novel, which has less to do with the existence of I.G.
Farben and the "They"-system than it has to do with the
nature of their agency and the kinds of power they impose.
As Enzian notes, "[t]here ARE things to hold to. None of it
may look real, but some of it is. Really." 


Spencer is right on here and note that in his essay he
follows Enzian about, Enzian is the character most likely to 
uncover the truth, find the keys. 

Burkett's essay notes the shift in VL. 


Vineland, however, marks a distinct shift away from
Pynchon's earlier concern with these relations between
ontology and agency. Indeterminacy does not lead to anxiety
of "agency panic" and thus to a "quest" for answers to the
question of agency. Rather than searching for the source of
control, characters in Vineland already know what the prime
mover and ordering force of the world is: power. More
specifically, the power of the State as it is wielded
through law enforcement. This, of course, does not decrease
the level of paranoia; it simply makes it justified, even
necessary. If, in Pynchon's earlier works the uncertainty
and ambiguity of the systems generates paranoia over the
interests, motives, and agents of power, Vineland presents
paranoia as a "proper" response to the arbitrarily applied
coercive, repressive power of the State as it is manifested
in the late twentieth century in the form of a highly
militarized and nearly omnipotent law enforcement apparatus,
"the state law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling
itself 'America.'"

As Hite notes, "Vineland is Pynchon's first novel to name
current political names," and it explicitly identifies these
names with the systems of domination the characters face. 

Pynchon's historical vision is a little broader and perhaps
more synchronic. As Pynchon layers the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s,
and 1980s through stories of various members of Frenesi's
family and their leftist political struggles, he does around
what appears to be a common logic of the State as primarily
interested in its own self-perpetuation by eradicating
dissent and eliminating the viability of alternative
possibilities for social organization. 

And while most of the force is a bit more subtle, operating
through representations rather than direct physical force,
not a paranoid fear, but a realistic, justified one, that
Pynchon identifies as the primary means by which law
maintains order. Because the law is not, and cannot be , a
fully autonomous, closed system that operates through the
impartial application of determinate rules, law is, at root,
a Weberian system of domination. But the most important
element of the "system" is not its ability to "rationally"
utilize a formal system of rules to pursue an arbitrary end
but rather the irrational "irrationality" of its operation,
the arbitrariness of its application by interested agents of
the law, couples with its ability to enforce constructions
of reality that can remove any sense of agency from its
subjects and canalize desire toward authority rather than
individual freedom. 

The true "genius" of the law is not its ability to conceal
the violence of its operations but rather its ability ton
take advantage of popular culture to make this unnecessary
by manufacturing a desire for the violence and force of
these operations. Thus, opposition is not rendered difficult
but erases from the field of desired possibilities.  


But is this the shift that dissapointed so many
readers/critics of VL? Is VL as Hite asserts, "Pynchon's
first novel to name current political names," and to 
explicitly identify these
names with the systems of domination the characters face?  

To name explicitly? 

Is Pynchon's historical vision  a little broader and perhaps
more synchronic  (Pynchon layers the 1930s, 1950s, 1960s,
and 1980s through stories of various members of Frenesi's
family)? 

Reilly's essay demonstrates that the historical vision of GR
layers 500 years of history in the pig hero episode alone
(it includes, btw, not only the 1960s and 1930s, but several
decades from the 16th to the 20th century. Your discovery of
the Anabaptist
allusions in VL confirm the fact that Pynchon keeps
returning to historical crisis
that parallel American historical crisis or slippage towards
crisis in the current moment of the novels. As I have noted,
in terms of the Philosophical history of GR, Pynchon
specifically notes 500 years of metaphysics from the
Renaissance to LSD.  In Thoreen's essay, "The President's
Emergency War Powers,"
he sez, "Unlike the CL, Pynchon, in Vineland, allows us out
of the locked room,
provided we use the historical keys he has included in the
novel."  Thoreen OCLR.764

But the keys are in all the stories, it will take years,
years and years for critics to see this, it will take the
death of postmodern critical theories dominance and
privilege, it will take someone to write a Prettyplace 18
volume set. 

I wonder if Joe Boulter, a Grad student, lurks on this list.
I'm sure I was the one that 
identified the connection to Twain's Huck Finn and Tom
Sawyer in TSI, but, oh well, and I wonder what rj has
written, he thanked me several times for the stuff I
posted,  on enfetishment, on technology, etc......


OH, well, I don't care to publish anything just yet, if I
did it would be on M&D. 

Perhaps the next novel will shift the critics, perhaps they
will start citing Hollander.