Literary Ecology, Daniel R. White

[Jane Sweet]

Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez's
Mile Zero and Thomas Pynchon's Vineland by Daniel R. White, 
1991


Literary ecological theory stands, like Pynchon's
     work itself according to some critics, with one foot
     on traditional metaphysical ground and one in the
     postmodern void.2 What is traditional in literary
     ecology is the acceptance of a value hierarchy,
     namely the Great Chain of Being, stemming from the
     classical and medieval worlds. The most salient
     feature of the Chain for the human condition, Dwight
     Eddins argues following Eric Voegelin, is that it
     represents a metaxic tension between spiritual order
     and material chaos:

                                      Divine--Nous
                                     Psyche--Noetic
                                    Psyche--Passions
                                      Animal Nature
                                    Vegetative Nature
                             Apeiron--Depth [the limitless]

     The Divine Nous represents the upper limit of the
     human quest for spiritual fulfillment, not attainable
     in the flesh but a necessary eschaton or goal for
     human striving. "The substitution of a finite, purely
     'human' eschaton for the infinitely receding nous
     means the negation of the spiritual (noetic) quest that
     produces the real order of the human," Eddins
     explains. "The metaxic tension collapses, and man
     is pulled by apeirontic vectors through lower and
     lower levels of his being . . . " (22). The Gnostic
     quest is to appropriate the Nous to attain the
     all-too-human goals of power and control, on the
     part of an elite--THEM in Pynchon--possessed of
     Gnosis, over lower orders of being, the
     Preterite--US. The quest to become a noetic power
     elite sets up a paranoid cycle of oppression: 

         For the gnostic elite . . . the
         alien world is a thing to be
         "overcome" . . . the elite
         experience, ironically, a
         preterite paranoia that drives
         them to seek mastery through
         their elite gnosis; but in so
         doing they define a new preterite
         in those who are not privy to
         this plexus of knowledge and
         power, but are pawns to be
         manipulated in its service. This
         preterity, in turn, can escape
         preterition only by adopting the
         power techniques of their
         masters; but in the very act they
         naturally tend to become--in
         Wordsworth's phrase--"Oppressors
         in their turn."

                                                                    
(23)

     Eddins' discussion is too early to have included
     Vineland, but what better description of the
     relationship between its oppressor and oppressed,
     Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates, and their victims?


hmmmmmm Gnostic? 

The gnostic, entrepreneurial splitting of the
     hierarchy of being also breaks down the metaxy, in
     ecological terms the dynamic equilibrium, of the
     Great Chain. In cybernetic language ecosystems may
     be viewed as hierarchies, or heterarchies, which
     exhibit tendencies toward both homeostasis and
     runaway. As Gregory Bateson explains, 

         All biological and evolving
         systems (i.e., individual
         organisms, animal and human
         societies, ecosystems, and the
         like) consist of complex
         cybernetic networks, and all such
         systems share certain formal
         characteristics. Each system
         contains subsystems which are
         potentially regenerative, i.e.,
         which would go into exponential
         "runaway" if uncorrected.
         (Examples of such regenerative
         components are Malthusian
         characteristics of population,
         schismogenic changes of personal
         interaction, armaments races,
         etc.).

                                                                   
(447)

     Consider population, for example. Prey,
     unconstrained by traditional predators, will increase
     in population until limited by some other factor,
     perhaps disastrously by overpopulation which can
     decimate the population. So too, if man sprinkles his
     produce with DDT and kills off the bird population,
     the insects which were the original target of the
     poison will increase all the more rapidly
     unconstrained by their original predator and have to
     be "exterminated" by more toxin. 

   6.This kind of degenerative cycle is what Eddins
     calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, "modes
     of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of
     gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the
     metaphysical force fields of Pynchon's cosmos: the
     instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the
     distinction between secular and religious
     constructs" (23). In other words, Brock and Frenesi
     and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the
     logic of ecological runaway, what Joseph Slade
     Thomas Pynchon 125) has called "excluded
     middles and bad shit" in reference to the plight of
     Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49: under the
     Reagan-Bush version of the Entrepreneurial New
     World Order, you must either become a pawn of the
     new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into
     preterition. And if you want to fight back, you must
     also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the
     mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake
     of power, to switch roles from Oppressed to
     Oppressor so that the original split in the human
     ecology escalates in what Bateson called the
     Romano-Palestinian System.4 This is the koan with
     which many of Pynchon's worthy characters are
     presented. 


In other words epistemological and ecological error
     are identical with the modernist paradigm and its
     industrial project. The literary-ecological
     correction of the error in Vineland is arguably an
     extension of what Eddins calls "Orphic Naturalism"
     in Gravity's Rainbow: "a counterreligion to the
     worship of mechanism, power, and--
     ultimately--death" (5). 

This attribution of "mind" to "man" and
     materiality to "nature," characteristic of the
     Cartesian dualism of res cogitans as the human
     cogito and res extensa as the objective world, and
     further expressed in the masculine subject of power
     dominating "mother" nature, as it is in the
     entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his
     "real estate," is arguably one of the principal targets
     of the literary ecological critique. Thus literary
     ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep
     ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but
     approaches them in terms of a postmodern
     ecological rubric which steps past the traditional
     either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed, Elite and
     Preterite, Sacred and Secular, as deftly as Pynchon's
     Ninjette DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) slips past
     Brock Vond's guards. 
This is not unlike the feeling which drew the
     "flower children" back to nature in the 1960's,
     articulated and sustained in the writings of Edward
     Abbey and Annie Dillard. Romantic writing was in
     direct response to the urbanization and
     mechanization of life effected by the Industrial
     Revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a
     response to what Mumford called the Megamachine
     of modern technology, economy, society and polity
     which has destroyed and displaced much of the
     human lifeworld, of "Earth House Hold" in the
     words of poet Gary Snyder. An incipient ecological
     sensibility is also evident in the "persistent
     modernist nostalgia for vanished axiological
     foundations in the midst of vividly experienced
     anomie" which Eddins finds in the work of Pynchon
     and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in
     ecological dimension, by T.S. Eliot in The Waste
     Land. Here images of a fouled, poisoned
     environment merge with those of human spiritual
     and physical demise--

                                      Unreal City,
                          Under the brown fog of a winter
dawn,
                       A Crowd flowed over London Bridge, so
many,
                       I had not thought death had undone so
many.
          
                        A rat crept softly through the
vegetation
                          Dragging its slimy belly on the
bank
                          While I was fishing in the dull
canal
          
                                    The river sweats
                                    Oil and tar . . .

     --amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very
     shards inspire hope of renewal: "These fragments I
     have shored against my ruins." Additionally, the
     fusion of human imagination with nature's images, as
     well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of
     Magical Realism, for example in Gabriel Garcia
     Marquez's Autumn of the Patriarch, is arguably an
     important forebear, and Carlos Fuentes' recent
     Christopher Unborn I might well have included
     with Mile Zero and Vineland as an example of
     literary ecology, except for its problematic
     representation of gender. African literature is also a
     likely ancestor of the genre, for example Chinua
     Achebe's Things Fall Apart where the
     fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of
     European colonialism is explored, as it is in
     American literature by Peter Matthiessen, with
     regard to South American Indians, in another likely
     progenitor, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Doris
     Lessing's Briefing for a Descent into Hell presents
     a profound fusion of the human mind with nature's,
     as her Golden Notebook reflects on feminist and
     socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which
     come together and are uplifted and transformed
     (Aufhebung) in her Canopus in Argos: Archives,
     especially Shikasta. Vonnegut's Breakfast of
     Champions and Galapagos should not be
     overlooked in the search for LitEcol ancestors and,
     particularly where Pynchon is concerned, I would
     look up from these printed artifacts and seriously
     review the adventures of Tweety and Sylvester
     Vineland 22).