VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 5:51 AM
Subject: Re: VLVL (6) Pynchon's parables


> > The Ghost of Picnic Future:
>
> Yes, I like this idea. It matches up with the way that that Apocalyptic
> rocket *almost* drops on the world of the complacent reader at the end of
> _GR_, the text itself a warning, a wake-up call. "There is time ... " In
> _Vineland_ Pynchon looks back at the history of the American "left" in the
> 20th C. and sees it for the failure, or series thereof, it was.
>
> best
>

A failure in not being able to stop the upcoming fascism in US-policy, yes,
but it's a mild criticism given the end of the novel.

Otto

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There has yet to be a critic who, like the ghost of Walter Rathenau in
Gravity's Rainbow, is able to "see the whole shape at once," the continuing
pattern of executive aggrandizement so carefully interwoven into the
exposition of Vineland and which leads up to a moment as apocalyptic as any
in recent fiction.
(...)
 Pynchon is acutely aware of the steady encroachment in the twentieth
century of the executive branch on the legislative, and, in Vineland, he has
documented some of the attendant threats to our individual civil liberties.
Seen from this perspective, the scope of the novel is considerably larger
than previously recognized, reaching back to arguments over the separation
of powers made before and during the Constitutional Convention and looking
forward to the present day, the late 1990s, a period in which an increasing
number of city and county governments balance their budgets with proceeds
from the auction of assets seized in the War on Drugs, and in which an
increasing number of police departments across the United States have
established paramilitary units deployed with increasing frequency.  Given
this devolution of American political practice, it is fitting that Vineland
opens not only with echoes of Orwell and Kafka, but with an extended
parallel to a short story by an early American writer. Like Washington
Irving's Rip Van Winkle, Zoyd Wheeler and the contemporary American voter
have slept through a change in governments. In addition to other parallels,
Pynchon counters Rip's "naturally ... thirsty soul" with Zoyd's once regular
marijuana use and tubal intoxication, physiological manifestations of the
political apathy displayed by the majority of Americans since the 1970s.
     That there are reasons for that apathy is beside the point: Pynchon is
not interested in excuses, but effects. As Pynchon himself puts it in
Nearer, My Couch, to Thee:

    In this century we have come to think of Sloth as primarily political, a
failure of public will allowing the introduction of evil policies and the
rise of evil regimes, the worldwide fascist ascendancy of the 1920's and
30's being perhaps Sloth's finest hour, though the Vietnam era and the
Reagan-Bush years are not far behind.

Neither is Rip's invocation of the tyrant George III irrelevant, considering
the Reagan administration's systematic attempts to extend its authority
while avoiding accountability. The message sent to Zoyd "from forces unseen"
is that Johnson is no longer in the White House, and it is time to start
paying attention.
     For all of its focus on the sixties, seventies, and eighties, then,
Vineland is as historically grounded as V. and Gravity's Rainbow, reaching
back to federalist issues regarding the separation of powers, the proper
role of the various branches of government, and the intent of the
Constitution's framers to guarantee individual freedoms. Pynchon's focus on
the threat to those freedoms that arose during the Reagan presidency is a
natural extension of his interest in (and dramatization of) imperialism (V.)
and the concentration of power (Gravity's Rainbow). The historical and
technological developments Pynchon traces in V. and Gravity's Rainbow,
especially the series of geopolitical crises chronicled in V., have been
replaced in Vineland with pervasive references to Vietnam and Nicaragua,
which in turn summon the U.S. government's series of undeclared wars in the
second half of this century: Korea, Laos, Cambodia, Iran, Angola, Lebanon,
El Salvador, Grenada, Libya, South Africa, Panama, and Iraq. The pandemic
frequency of such military activity is one result of the redefinition since
1947 of "National Security," which is itself a direct result of, among other
things, the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems at the heart
of Gravity's Rainbow.
http://www.law.utexas.edu/lpop/etext/okla/thoreen24.htm

Like Anti-Oedipus and The Mass Psychology of Fascism, Vineland is an attempt
to account for the fascist "perversion of the desire of the masses." There
have been fascists in America for decades. Take for example someone like
Brock Vond, the U.S. Attorney, COINTELPRO specialist and anti-drug zealot
who is the novel's anti-hero. He's called a "fascist" several times. Though
the word is often used casually and inaccurately, Brock Vond is a real
old-time fascist. Like the Nazis, he was a devotee of the thinking of
pioneer criminologist Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), who'd believed that the
brains of criminals were short on lobes that controlled civilized values
like morality and respect for the law, tending instead 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 [...] By Brock's time the theory had lapsed into a quaint,
undeniably racist spinoff from nineteenth-century phrenology, crude in
method and long superseded, although it seemed reasonable to Brock.
(...)
Vineland is set in 1984, the year that Reagan was re-elected President. Of
course, it was also the year that George Orwell set his famous
anti-Stalinist and anti-fascist novel, 1984. Orwell -- or, rather, the
betrayed relationship between Winston and Julia -- is clearly the reference
when Brock Vond tells Zoyd, just after Vond has gotten him to snitch on his
ex-wife for the FBI, "Believe me, she'd have done the same to you." But
Orwell wasn't really given his due back in 1984, perhaps because nothing
exactly like the following scene from Vineland ever took place.

Was Reagan about to invade Nicaragua at last, getting the home front all
nailed down, ready to process folks by the tens of thousands into detention,
arm local 'Defense Forces,' fire everybody in the Army and then deputize
them in order to get around the Posse Comitatus Act? Copies of these
contingency plans had been circulating all summer, it wasn't much of a
secret [...] Could it be that some silly-ass national emergency exercise was
finally coming true? As if the Tube [television set] were suddenly to stop
showing pictures and instead announce, 'From now on, I'm watching you.'

Pynchon clearly believed that, just because the year 1984 didn't bring
actual "telescreens" into every home in the country, this didn't mean that
Reaganism wasn't an American form of fascism. The year 1984 was in fact the
perfect occasion to ask what Pynchon calls "the perennial question of
whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or
whether that darkness had fallen long stupified years ago, and the light
they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the
same bright-colored shadows," that is, the old question that brings forth
"the names -- some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names
good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia -- Hitler,
Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that
collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not
constellated above in any nightwide remoteness of light, but below,
diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time
deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly
fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because
of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath."

In hindsight it seems clear that 1984 did indeed mark the end of the
Twilight and the beginning of the Dark Night of Fascism in the United
States.
http://www.notbored.org/vineland.html