Shocking ambiguity (who was saved by Reagan?)

[cathy ramirez]

Still Crazy After All Those Years
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon
Salman Rushdie
January 14, 1990
The New York Times


Thomas Pynchon is no sentimentalist, however, and the
balance between light
and dark is expertly held throughout this novel, so
that we remain uncertain until
the final pages as to which will prevail, hippie
heaven or Federal nemesis. And
we are left, at the last, with an image of such
shockingly apt moral ambiguity that
it would be quite wrong to reveal it here.

Have to agree that Thomas Pynchon is no
sentimentalist. The balance or the conflict of light
and dark is sustained throughout his texts. To
disentangle this tangle of lines in Pynchon's books
strips them of the "shocking apt moral ambiguity" that
Rushdie alludes to. It's shocking to the reader of
Pynchon's novels partly because the reader is apt to
side with the light and not the dark. But Pynchon
flips the switch or it is flipped some how and we left
in the dark, invisible and alone. Or, it flips and we
can love again. But the ambiguity is shocking. In V.,
after 1945--the end of the war-- the world flops and
there is no love. There is no hate, but there is no
love. Shocking.

Invisible, yes, what do the furnishings matter, at
this stage of things?

Each has been hearing a voice, one he thought was
talking only to him, say
"You didn't really believe you'd be saved. Come now,
we all know who we are by now. No one was ever going
to take the trouble to save YOU, old fellow...."

Gravity's Rainbow page 4

No one is going to take the trouble to save YOU. But
maybe we are not so all alone and invisible. Maybe we
are not trapped in solopsistic existentialism. Maybe,
somehow, a switch can be thrown and we will be saved
from the darkness. But we all know that switches once
set can be reset. Pointman? Reagan? What makes the
world flip and flop?
Who has their hands on the switch or on the wheel?
God?

"We are digits in God's computer...and the only thing
we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the
only thing He
sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world
of toil
and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the
hacker we call
God."

Vineland

In V. Benny is not reading Ellison's Invisible Man but
Existential Sheriff.
He has a conversation with SHROUD. Apt and SHOCKING.

Somehow Profane had difficulty getting back in the
plot (in the plot? not into?) of
Existential Sheriff. After a while he got up and went
over to SHROUD. "What do you mean, we'll be like you
and SHOCK someday? You mean dead?"
Am I dead? If I am then that's what I mean.
"If you aren't then what are you?"
Nearly what you are. None of you have very far to go.
"I don't understand."
So I see. But you're not alone. That's the comfort
isn't it?

V. Chapter 10 at the end of Part II

Flip/Flop

What makes the world flip and flop?

That war, the world flipped. But come '45, and they
flopped. Here in Harlem they flopped. Everything got
cool--no love, no hate, no worries, no excitement.

V. Chapter 10 Part IV

No love after 45? SHOCKING!




Vineland the good
Review of Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon
Christina Koning
February 1, 1990
The Guardian

The triumph of the Right under Reagan in the Eighties
becomes, in Pynchon's analysis,
only the latest reversal in a series of conflicts
reaching back to the clashes between US government
forces and the IWW in the Thirties, or hostilities
between McCarthyites and
left-wing liberals in the Forties. If the alternative
society in whatever
manifestation New Dealer Age of Aquarius is revealed
as an illusion,
the vision which gave rise to it is an enduring one.
Pynchon's book is
a celebration of this vision, of the alternative
America, which no
administration, however reactionary or fumbling, has
ever managed to suppress.

The latest reversal in a series. But what causes this
reversal?
What saves us from repression? What permits people to
love again?

Shocking ambiguities abound.




Totalizing Postmodernism: Master-narratives in
Pynchon's Vineland
By Bruce A. Sullivan

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_sullivan.html


Because Brock seeks to impose his master-narrative on
others, it may be said
that he represents that same belief system. His
organization, though, functions
under yet another master-narrative -- that of
"Reaganomics." As Cowart relates,
"In a single generation -- from the mid-sixties to the
mid-eighties, America veered
from a liberal to conservative bias, from the New
Frontier and the Great Society
to 'Reaganomics,' from hordes of student demonstrators
to whole undergraduate
populations majoring in business" (75). Reaganomics
functions as a
master-narrative because it dictates the actions of
"whole undergraduate
populations." These students view reality based on
Ronald Reagan's conservative
economic plan; they accept it, and they act based on
that reality, thus preparing
for the future by enrolling in business courses. Near
the end of Vineland, these
two master-narratives -- Brock and Reaganomics -- come
into conflict. Just as
Brock is about to abduct Prairie, "some white male far
away must have wakened
from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was
over" (Pynchon 376). Reagan
cuts the funding for Brock's strike force, and Brock,
"his authorizations
withdrawn, now [is] winched back up, protesting all
the way, bearings and brake
pads loudly shrieking, trying to use his remote but
overridden by Roscoe at the
main controls" (376). Readers feel a sense of relief
as Prairie is saved from
Death-by-Brock, but strangely, Pynchon has saved her
with Reaganomics. He
has ultimately succumbed to the master-narratives, and
he trades one for the
other. Prairie cannot escape completely from either;
she is doomed to live under
Reaganomics, and Pynchon concludes the novel with
Prairie longing for Brock's
return.




The more the melodramatic language of Vineland casts
Brock Vond as a sadistic villain, the more the logic
of the action  casts him as a partner in a dance of
mutual courtship. Some
readers, taking the tone for the substance, have
complained  that Brock and the other Justice
Department heavies in  Vineland seem disappointingly
tame when compared with the
real heavies who occupied the department under Nixon
and  Reagan.

But like all literature that tries to make a moral
argument, Vineland sees little point in placing blame
on
those who are unlikely ever to read it. It tries to
discomfort its readers,
first by agreeing with their self-satisfied sense that
their unhappiness is the result of
others' actions, then by quietly demonstrating that
the  actions that most afflict them are their own. The
1960s   radicals (and the peaceful apolitical
potsmokers whom  Pynchon treats with sentimental
affection)
do not even have the satisfaction of defeating Brock
Vond,  who is defeated by his own side. Ronald Reagan,
like a half-conscious deus ex machina, wakes from a
dream and, by
cutting Vond's budget, interrupts him in mid-villainy.

Pynchon 's vision is sacramental but not otherworldly.
 Instead of looking away from this world to one
somewhere else, he looks for the hidden order and
significance of the world he lives in. Vineland's
sacramental geography is a  vision of a sacred place,
the fictional Vineland County in
northern California, the place that Zoyd Wheeler comes
to recognize as a harbor of refuge, "Vineland the
Good." This visionary Vineland occupies the real
geography of the
California coast from Crescent City to Eureka and the
redwood forests nearby. But its name hints that it is
an epiphany of  that thousand-year-old alternate
America founded by Norse sailors, who, unlike the
sailors
who founded the America we live in, never conquered 
the land or usurped its indigenous people. (p. 44)


In these final chapters all the book's generations of
the  living gather for another reunion, one that joins
the
families of Frenesi Gates's grandparents. The older
members of these two families are Wobblies and
Hollywood  left-wingers, bearers of a heritage of an
alternate and unofficial America. Pynchon treats this
alternate tradition as a matriarchal one: the novel
traces the ancestry of all its women characters while
treating the men as if they sprang directly from the
earth. Frenesi's
hatred for her newborn daughter,  and voluntary
separation from her soon
afterward, violates that matriarchal line, just as her
murderous entanglement with
Brock Vond is a sign of what the book's historical
myth regards as the betrayal of the true alternate
America by the 1960s left.  After so thorough a
betrayal no return or  recovery can ever be complete.
All of Pynchon 's books are permeated by one or two
central ideas: entropy in V., the
manifestation of the sacred in The Crying of Lot 49,
and the bureaucratization of charisma, as described by
Max Weber, in  Gravity's Rainbow. In Vineland the
central idea is less  abstract than in the earlier
books. A fall into an era  without life or death,
followed by a return to human time,
is less a concept than a parable of personal
experience. It  describes in visionary terms a phase
that can occur in  anyone's life when all significant
relations and events seem
bafflingly distant and inaccessible.   What makes this
vision luminous (to use
Pynchon's word of praise) in Vineland is not the
tendentious historical myth that
attaches to it, but its intensely personal quality
Zoyd  Wheeler's years of separation from his wife are
his years in  a realm without time, when he dreams of
an impossible
return. But he comes to recognize those same  years as
the ones in which he learned
to value his daughter and their shared  harbor in
Vineland. This part of the
narrative, lightly sketched in the margins of the
brightly  colored central plot, reads
like an allegory of a lived experience of loss and
renewal.  For all its silliness and
longueurs, Vineland is the most troubling and
exuberant work  of American fiction to appear in many
years.

Edward Mendelson, "Levity's Rainbow," in The New
Republic,
Vol. 203,  Nos. 2 & 3, July 9 & 16, 1990, pp. 40-6.




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