VLVL2 (1): _Vineland_ and "Rip Van Winkle" (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

from David Thoreen, "Thomas Pynchon's political parable: Parallels between Vineland and "Rip Van Winkle" " 07-01-2001 


"As a historical novelist whose subject is America and whose passion is politics, Thomas Pynchon is aware of the twentieth-century evolution of "the imperial presidency." Vineland (1990), Pynchon's fourth novel, reflects the steady encroachment in that century of the executive branch on the legislative and dramatizes some of the attendant threats to Americans' civil liberties. It is fitting, then, that Pynchon has embedded in his novel an extended parallel to an early American political parable, Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle." Although Irving's style has been criticized as excessively British, the thematic concerns of "Rip Van Winkle" are distinctly American and are quite relevant to Vineland and the presidential usurpation of power in the 1980s. 
[...] 

"Vineland is Pynchon's wake-up call to the American voter, who, like Rip Van Winkle and Pynchon's own protagonist Zoyd Wheeler, has been asleep for twenty years. Indeed, both texts involve scenes of awakening. The first sentence of Pynchon's novel reads, "Later than usual one morning in 1984, Zoyd Wheeler drifted awake in sunlight through a creeping fig ... with a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof' (3), an ominous updating of this midstory passage from "Rip Van Winkle": "On awaking he found himself on the green knoll.... He rubbed his eyes-it was a bright, sunny morning. The birds were hopping and twittering among the bushes" (776). Rip has obviously slept later than usual, and Irving points up this irony by having Rip say to himself that "Surely... I have not slept here all night" (776). Calling for his dog, Rip is "only answered by the cawing of a flock of idle crows" (777); these crows are replaced in Vineland by the blue jays that, in Zoyd's dream, had been carrier pigeons, "each bearing a message for him" (3). The military formation of the blue jays, along with their arrogant "stomping," the "creeping" fig, and the profusion of "messages," evoke the many-tentacled military and government bureaucracies that shape so much of modern life-and their publicly accountable apex, the president and commander-in-chief. 

"But the parallel does not end here. Both texts also include arrival scenes wherein the protagonists, oddly dressed, are attended by the heckling of children and by feelings of disorientation. As Rip approaches the village, he notes with surprise the costumes worn by its habitants, and when we find that "[t]hey all stared at him with equal marks of surprise," we must recall the outlandishness of Rip's own outmoded dress. As he enters the village itself, "[a] troop of strange children ran at his heels, hooting after him" (778). Similarly, Zoyd, wearing a colorful dress (bought at a discount shop specializing in large sizes, called, appropriately enough, "More Is Less"), and en route to a bar known as the Log Jam, gets stuck in "a convoy of out-of-state Winnebagos ... among whom ... he was obliged to gear down and put up with a lot of attention, not all of it friendly" (5). One girl screams that Zoyd "ought to be locked up" (5). 

"Rip's feelings of disorientation ("The very village was altered-it was larger and more populous... his familiar haunts had disappeared... every thing was strange" [778]) are echoed by Zoyd's experience at the Log Jam, where "right away he noticed that everything, from the cooking to the clientele, smelled different" (5). The Log Jam has been recently renovated and is now outfitted with "designer barstools" and a "jukebox ... reformatted to light classical and New Age music that gently peep[s] at the edges of audibility" (5, 6). "[A]bout the only thing that ha[s]n't been replaced [is] the original bar" (7). 



continued . . .

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