VLVL2 (9.5): "Karmic Adjustment"

[Dave Monroe]

"'It ain't a-zackly Tokyo here, you know, you can't
just go free-lancin' in 'karmic adjustment,' whatever
that is--nobody'll pay for it.'" (VL, Ch. 9, p. 172)


The moment of trauma, the apocalypse of the late 1960s
-- the moment that returns and is returned to --
contains the revelation that all social structures,
all human acts and culturally inflected desires, are
inhabited by the Cosmic Fascist. At this same
traumatic-apocalyptic moment, however, Vineland also
depicts alternatives which entail neither quietistic
withdrawal nor terrorism. The first of these
alternatives is Karmic Adjustment, Vineland's parodic
combination of psychoanalysis and Eastern religion.
The second is the recurring vision of utopian
possibility which, in Vineland, emerges at the same
moment as does cultural trauma and inevitably returns
with it as well. And these two forms of return -- the
working through of trauma and its symptomatic
reincarnations by means of Karmic Adjustment, and the
returns of utopian vision -- in combination constitute
Vineland's revised nostalgia.

[...]

Like the Thanatoids as symptoms of historical trauma,
Karmic Adjustment as the working through of those
symptoms is a joke, a bit of recycled 60s absurdity.
And yet, it is precisely as joke, as absurdity, that
we can see Karmic Adjustment as a figure for Pynchon's
novelistic technique in Vineland. Traumas of the past
return and are repeated as symptoms; but these
symptoms may be outfitted in ridiculous historical
costumes and take bizarre cultural forms. 

http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.595/berger.595

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/papers_berger.html


In the life of every human being events constantly
take place which have nothing at all to do with his
merits or his guilt in the past. Such events find
their karmic adjustment in the future. If something
happens to me today without being my fault, I shall be
compensated for it in the future. One thing is
certain: nothing remains without karmic adjustment.
However, whether an experience of the human being is
the effect of his karmic past or the cause of his
karmic future will have to be determined in every
individual instance. And this cannot be decided by the
intellect accustomed to dealing with the physical
world, but solely by occult experience and
observation.

http://wn.elib.com/Steiner/Articles/ReinKarma/ReKarm_questions.html

Karmic Adjustment Party Invitation

http://www.summitawards.com/2000gold/AOR.html


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