VLVL2 (1): The New Historicist Creepers (part 3)

[Tim Strzechowski]

continuing . . . 

The dedication at the beginning of Vineland reads "To my Mother and Father." It seems consistent, therefore, that the novel deals with Prairie's search for her own parents, a quest that shapes the content and the structure of the novel. Again this aspect of the text fits with established patterns of archaeology, genealogy, and the search for "invariants." When Prairie looks in the mirror she tries to see her mother's face in her own, as does Sasha at the family picnic. Family resemblances are one of those chaotic "invariants" that persist, though not in a clear-cut causal fashion. In the last paragraph of the novel Prairie awakens in the forest to see the face of her dog Desmond, which is the "spit and image" of his grandmother Chloe. For Katherine Hayles, this persistence of family ties represents a recuperative element in Vineland. She sees two networks or systems at work in the text: the family-oriented, essentially good, kinship system and the state-controlled "snitch" system. For Hayles, the end of the novel sees the playing out of these two forces, culminating in the family reunion and its aftermath. After quoting Emerson on divine retribution (the passage that is read aloud at the family picnic), Hayles claims that "[t]he passage implies that the kinship system will finally be vindicated by divine justice, a possibility the plot endorses when its two major strands intersect" (89). However, the vindication of the good family system is not as clear-cut as she suggests; the novel' s ending seems to vindicate neither system. 

In creating these two systems, Hayles emphasizes the positive virtues of the procreating family system against the sterility of the "state family." She identifies Brock Vond as representative of the state family, replete with nightmares about being forced to procreate, seeing no family resemblance in faces, and subscribing to the theories of the criminologist Caesar Lombroso (1836-1909). 

[W]ho'd believed that the brains of criminals were short on lobes that controlled civilised values like morality and respect for the law, tending indeed to resemble animal more than human brains, and thus caused the crania that housed them to develop differently, which included the way their faces would turn out looking. (Vineland 272) 

Hayles applauds Prairie's rejection of Vond when he claims to be her father: "'But you can't be my father, my blood type is A. Yours is Preparation H'" (376). What Hayles fails to mention is that as the novel closes Prairie returns to the forest clearing and appeals for Brock Vond's return, "You can come back. . . . It's OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don't care. Take me any place you want." This aspect of the novel does not sit very well with her recuperative thesis and poses a general problem: How clear-cut are Pynchon's politics in Vineland? Prairie, like Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, realizes that both paternity and nationality are to an extent "legal fictions." 

The historical dimension of these two notions can be expanded through the notion of Vineland as national allegory. In a sense, Prairie represents a "virgin land" with a choice between two fathers and two versions of American history that accompany them. Like her mother and grandmother Prairie is simultaneously attracted to both these divergent historical narratives. The leftist/alternative culture is represented by Hub Gates and Zoyd, and the establishment is represented by Brock Vond and the "men in uniform." Adding to the layer of national allegory in the text is the fact that Vineland was the first part of America discovered by the Vikings in the eleventh century. David Cowart also points out that the latitude of the real Vineland - Vineland, New Jersey - corresponds with that of the West Coast Vineland of the novel. In this way the novel seems to span the breadth of North America. The question remains as to whether Pynchon is portraying the traditional American literary motif of the New World betrayed, or whether the vision of the novel precludes this perspective. Much of the critical opinion thus far expressed about the novel's condemnation of modern America stresses the role of television in the fall from the sixties to the modem culture of simulation. 



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