Pynchon & race

[Doug Millison]

Thanks for your long post, Terrance, and your insights into Pynchon's
evolving attitudes vis-a-vis race as reflected in his work.

Vineland presents some interesting elements -- the two tow-truck drivers, I
forget their names and don't have a copy of the book with me, the guys who
escort Brock Vond to the river crossing where the spirits of the native
people on the other side will remove his bones, are African-American and
Chicano veterans of the Vietnam War.  As I recall, P doesn't do much to
develop their ethnicity but instead focuses their characterization around
their war experiences and their interaction with their Vietnamese lady boss
-- almost as if P wanted to avoid zeroing in on their differences vis-a-vis
race and ethnic culture.  At the same time, P plays around a lot with media
images of Asians in Vineland, the martial arts movie and monster movie
stereotypes prominent among them, but he does that primarily by making his
main martial arts practitioner an American woman, and his Japanese
character, Takeshi (presumably the same from GR) is an insurance adjustor, a
job role that well expresses the tendencies of global capital to hedge its
bets by analyzing and to the highest possible degree controlling the mystery
that erupts into daily life despite all efforts to conquer nature and keep
death at bay.  My point here, and I may well be reading too much into this
and making distinctions that closer consideration of P's text won't fully
support, is that P seems to back away, in Vineland, from the racial material
that, if Terrance is right, he skewed, in V., in away that he later
regretted, and from the rather aggressive treatment of racial issues that he
explores in GR.  My feeling is that P might have been getting even deeper
into the implications of dealing with racial material, the deeper he got
into working on M&D, where he explicitly puts the racial issue (slavery,
genocide) in the colonial context.