VLVL2 (3): The Snitch System (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Sylvester and Tweety, Zoyd and Hector, Hector and Fife -- through its "doublings," chapter three introduces the theme of "snitches," one that will gradually dovetail with notions of family and loyalty throughout the novel.  The early pages of the chapter deal specifically with the concept of "snitching" for the government, most obvious in the "fatal five-spot" Van Meter scores unwittingly from Hector, as well as the description of Zoyd's snitch ethic, in which he, "to be sure, made a point of never pocketing any of Hector's PI money personally [...] Each time Zoyd failed to inform on these people, Hector grew furious [...]" (24), and Zoyd's reference to the "personal snitch Safeway, just drop in, we're open 24 hours" (25) reinforces the exasperation he's felt over the years because of Hector's federale presence.

N. Katherine Hayles, in her essay "'Who Was Saved?': Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon's Vineland" (The Vineland Papers), examines this theme, thus:

[...] "The family as it is constituted in Vineland is both literal and metaphoric.  The framing narrative is the teenage Prairie's search for her absent mother, Frenesi Gates, supposedly gone underground because of her involvement in a radical film collective.  Turning inward toward a familial context inself constitutes part of the answer to Hector's question.  Obvious to everyone is the failure of the sixties to solve the problems the radical movement shouted to the nation -- poverty, racism, American economic and military imperialism.  Poor people were not saved, nor people of color, nor the people of Vietnam, Cambodia, and other Third World countries.  The only candidates left, apparently, are those who fought for the revolution.  If they saved no one else, did their struggle and vision save themselves?  The question points to the metaphoric meaning of the family, the generation gap that separates Pynchon from readers who wonder what all the fuss in the sixties was about.  Running parallel to Prairie's quest is another search, that of the narrator for his generation-gapped readers.  The vector of Prairie's journey points from the present into the past, whereas the narrator's concern moves from the past into the present."

Recall, of course, that one of the structural features of Vineland is its use of doubling, which Hayles suggests in her description of the two-pronged search motif.  But to continue:

"Along these vectors, two antagonistic force fields interact to organize the novel's responses to the double searches.  Running in one direction are networks of family and friends that connect generations and overcome isolation.  These I call the kinship system.  The kinship system yields representations with which even young readers can identify, encoding emotions and events that have not changed substantially over the generations.  Running in a contrary direction are networks of government agents that seek to gain information, incarcerate dissidents, and control the population -- the snitch system.  The snitch system, implying a skepticism about the government typical of the sixties, is likely to gain ready assent from ex-hippies but may strike younger readers as bizarre.

"The two systems, articulated through action and plot, are also connected by central metaphors that mediate between them.  These metaphoric connections imply that the two systems may be collaborative as well as opposed, the attitudes and preconceptions associated with one serving to make possible and structure the other.  Their entanglement echoes slothrop's dark dream in Gravity's Rainbow, when he realizes that "They" may be only another version of us.  Reaching out to a generation that never knew the sixties, Vineland also gives voice to the bewilderment that the generation formed by the sixties felt upon finding itself in the Reagan eighties, with Tubal culture apparently flourishing in every household and greed the bottom line on every contract.  How did we get from there to here, and how can we communicate with those who do not understand what "there" was?"

Continued . . .




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