VLVL2 (1): The New Historicist Creepers (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Mark Robberds, "The New Historicist Creepers of Vineland."  Critique: Studies in Contemporary  
     Fiction: 1995.
 
I dreamed this mortal part of mine 
Was metamorphosed to a vine 
Which crawling each and everyway 
Enthralled my dainty Lucia 
- Robert Herrick, "The Vine" (1648) 

Although Lucia appears to be both the lyrical and sexual object of Herrick's metaphorical vines, Pynchon, 342 years down the track of literary history, is more explicitly concerned with the vines themselves, rather than the ineffable object they encompass. Unlike Oedipa Maas in The Crying Of Lot 49, who searched for a transcendental meaning behind the hieroglyphic streets, Vineland offers a botanical examination of the cultural and institutional vines that constitute America in the 1980s. At the same time, it is indicative of the new forms of critical analysis that have shot roots into the soil of poststructuralism. [...] From its title down to its minor figures, Vineland bespeaks the theoretical environs of the new historicism just as overtly as Gravity's Rainbow bespoke those of deconstruction. This is not to suggest that the evolution of either Pynchon's work or literary theory is by any means one of exclusivity. On the contrary the eclecticism of each is essential to their nature. 

[...] 

The fabric of Vineland, set in 1984 (the year Foucault died), is woven with the strands of Foucault's enterprise. Genealogical in structure and archaeological in content, it traces umbilical vines back to the sixties. A botanical metaphor for the Foucauldian perspective, "vines" might be seen as the tangled network of traces that cling to our arboreal episteme. In Pynchon's novel, what the vines grow around is essentially inexpressible. The ability to see through or behind their density is denied to critic, reader, and writer alike. Yet it is possible to trace the growth of vines genealogically, that is, from buds back to roots. This is precisely the structure of Vineland - a genealogical view of recent American history that does not pretend any ability to predict a future or define a present, beyond or behind the impenetrable vines that constitute recent American culture. 

This aspect of Vineland's structure seems to have gone largely unnoticed in the critical reaction to the novel so far. In his article "Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon's Vineland," David Cowart argues that Vineland lacks the cultural and historical depth of V. and Gravity's Rainbow, claiming that the novel's persistent references to popular culture represent a "depressing litany" (71). To justify this position with the text and its author he claims that Pynchon wishes to portray an "ahistorical" America (71). However, if one takes into account the fact that the novel's structure is deeply involved with the very notion of history, coupled with its examination of a recent and radical past, Vineland actually appears to be more focused on history than Pynchon' s earlier texts. In fact, it deals specifically with the period in which those texts were produced. I would not suggest, however, that the view of history portrayed in the novel is in any way naive. In a sense Vineland presents a deconstruction of historical narrative, stressing the tenuousness of learning or knowing anything from history. 

History and genealogy find their nexus in the character of Prairie. Through her search for her mother, the narrative of Vineland transports itself genealogically back toward the sixties; the bulk of the novel is essentially backward looking (114-294). 

[...]

continued . . .

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