Cathy's reading of Vineland

[Doug Millison]

> If we assmume the essay is correct and Frenesi is an
> allegorical figure and if F is  1960s America and
> the
> tradition of the political Left in America and if
> she
> betrays that Left tradition because of some
> inherited
> sexual attraction for facscism (Brock)


I don't think you can easily reduce the novel to this
simplistic scheme, although some of these ideas may be
useful for discussing the novel's complexities.



> At the end of the novel Praire is calling for
> Brock's
> return. 


Part of what makes the above reduction of the novel to
a series of political slogans and paperdolls is that
Prairie's response to Brock is more complex than this.
 

"You can come back," she whispered, waves of cold
sweeping over her, trying to gaze steadily into a
night that now at any turn could prove unfaceable.
"It's OK, rilly. Come on, come in.  I don't care. Take
me anyplace you want."  (Vineland, 384).

The tug of the father is poweful, Prairie seems
enchanted as she casts her own spell, but Pynchon
undercuts her longing (as George Lucas undercuts
Luke's longing for his father in the movie scene to
which Pynchon might be alluding, although Pynchon
refrains from making Prairie into a rebel who can
strike back and kill the evil Father; externalizing
the evil and trying to kill it doesn't work, only
leads to more violence and suffering, as we see in the
story of the Lambton Worm that Pynchon puts in M&D, a
novel he's working simultaneously with Vineland):
  
"But suspecting already that he was no longer
available, that the midnight summoning would go safely
unanswered, even if she couldn't let go."

She's a tease, to some degree, flirting with danger
because she feels safe -- and she may be as deluded as
Desmond the dog, "thinking he must be home" (p. 385),
the novel's final phrase.







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