VLVL2 (1): The New Historicist Creepers (part 2)

[Tim Strzechowski]

continuing . . . 

Like all Pynchon's novels, the surface of Vineland constantly alludes to meta-narratives, among which literary theory doubtlessly figures. Apart from its title and structure, Vineland offers many analogies for the new historicist critical enterprise. These references range from the major institutions of the text, like DL and Takeshi's Karmology Klinic, through to the minor pastimes of Zoyd's youth, like surfing and the beer-riders. 

Besides a common interest in beer, both subcultures, whether up on a board or behind a 409, shared the terrors and ecstasies of the passive, taken rider, as if a car engine held encapsulated something likewise oceanic and mighty - a techno wave, belonging to distant others as the surf belonged to the sea, bought into by riders strictly as is, on the other party's terms. Suffers rode God's ocean, beer riders rode the momentum through the years of the auto industry's will. (37) 

At first it seems both surfing and beer-riding offer analogies for the passive rider taken along by the surge of history; however, as the narrative continues, Zoyd is drawn from the coast toward the beer- riders, and the disparity between the two pastimes is made more obvious. We discover that "death entered into" the beer-riders recreation more than that of the suffers. Unlike the suffers, the beer-riders are linked not to God's transcendental ocean but to the auto industry' s will, giving them a socio-historical link to the political fabric of society. The surfers are wholly unconcerned, in a deconstructionist sense, with origins; the waves approach them from an enigmatic ocean, and they "play" with them as they collapse on the shores of signification, a gesture that bespeaks repetitive variation and redundancy without consequence. The beer-rider's game is less predictable and far more dangerous. In a Foucauldian sense they follow the vinelike country roads blind to what lies ahead and out of touch with the momentum that drives them. They also serve as a metaphor for the sixties generation which set about changing a world in which they had already become complicit [...]. 

Pynchon offers another, somewhat parodic, allegory for new historicism in the form of DL and Takeshi's Karmology Klinic, an exercise intended to take the objective edge off the critical practice. Takeshi explains his service to a client thus: 

In traditional Karmic adjustment, he went on, sometimes it had taken centuries. Death was the driving pulse - everything moved as slowly as the cycles of birth and death, but this proved to be too slow for enough people to begin, eventually, to provide a market niche Death in modem Karmic Adjustment got removed from the process. (174) 

The Karmology Klinic is a reminder that the possibility of creating and acting upon an objective historical narrative is a dangerous one. In adopting the Foucauldian historical structure for his re-creation of the sixties, Pynchon points at once to its unique design as well as to its essential fictionality. Hence, DL's somber reminder that this form of intervention in the past is by no means an objective or value-free affair: 

This is what he had prepared her for - to inherit his own entanglement in the world, and now, with this perhaps demented Karmology hustle of Takeshi's, with the past as well, and the crimes behind the world, the thousand bloody arroyos in the hinterlands of time that stretched sombrely inland from the honky-tonk coast of Now. (180) 

The absence of death in the modern-Karmology becomes a metaphor for history without mortality. From the poststructuralist perspective, historical study, with its humanist prerogatives dismantled, is purely theoretical. 

Although references to science and technology are not as overt in Vineland as they are in Pynchon's other works, Joseph Slade has located a number of references to Galois's Group Theory in the text. Slade claims that the character of Weed Atman seems to be modeled closely on the historical Galois. Both are characterized as brilliant mathematicians who become involved in radical political organizations. Slade also points out that there are many passages about light in the novel that reveal the application of Group Theory to perception by the psychologist James Gibson. 

[...] 

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20030720/b90ff320/attachment.html>