VLVL2(3): The Family Unit

[Dave Monroe]

   "'How about your kid, then?'
   "'Yes, Hector.  What about her?  I really need to
hear some more federal advice right now about how I
should be bringin' up my own kid, we know already how
much all you Reaganite folks care about the family
unit, just from how much you're always in fuckin'
around with it.'"
   "'Maybe this ain't gonna work out after all.'" (VL,
Ch. 3, pp. 30-1)


"For my mother and father"

--Thomas Pynchon, dedication for Vineland (1990)


"you Reaganite folk"

Ronald Reagan was America's most ideological president
in his rhetoric, yet pragmatic in his actions. He
believed in balanced budgets, but never submitted one;
hated nuclear weapons, but built them by the
thousands; preached family values, but presided over a
dysfunctional family.... 

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/reagan/filmmore/description.html

And see as well, e.g., ...

http://www.mcwilliams.com/books/aint/404.htm

http://www.geocities.com/thereaganyears/familyvalues.htm


"the family unit"

Hayles, N. Katherine.  "'Who Was Saved?': Families,
   Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon's Vineland."
   Critique 32:2 (Winter 1990): 77-92.

Hayles, N. Katherine.  "'Who Was Saved?': Families,
   Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon's Vineland."
   The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's
   Novel.  Ed. Geofrrey Green et al.  Normal, IL:
   Dalkey Archive, 1994.  14-30

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....

[...]

   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, emplying 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?

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0308&msg=84230&sort=date

This emphasis on "snitching" is given further
treatment by Katherine Hayles, who defines a snitch
system and kinship system as "two antagonistic force
fields" that interact to organize Pynchon's novel. 
The snitch system is represented by the network of
government agents who seek to gain information and
control the population. To give in to the snitch
system is to signal an "initiation into the exchange
of money and information" ....

http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/moran24.htm

And cf. ...

With those children, he thought, that wretched woman
must lead a life of terror. Another year, two years,
and they would be watching her night and day for
symptoms of unorthodoxy. Nearly all children nowadays
were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means
of such organizations as the Spies they were
systematically turned into ungovernable little
savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency
whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party.
[...]. All their ferocity was turned outwards, against
the enemies of the State, against foreigners,
traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost
normal for people over thirty to be frightened of
their own children. And with good reason, for hardly a
week passed in which The Times did not carry a
paragraph describing how some eavesdropping little
sneak -- 'child hero' was the phrase generally used --
had overheard some compromising remark and denounced
its parents to the Thought Police....

http://www.online-literature.com/orwell/1984/

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