VLVL2 (4): Lines of Flight (part 1)

[Tim Strzechowski]

A passage of criticism that addresses a few of the topics we've examined thus far in VLVL2.
 
from Stefan Mattessich, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon.  Duke U Press: London, 2002.
 
"[...]

Vineland is a rereading of the 1960s in the light of the 1970s and 1980s that adopts the position that "implication" as a strategy cannot produce its own grounding in history and that this failure to do so can be situated in relation to a discete period.  The 1960s are definitely over in the novel, and if they were over before they even began, caught up in the gyre of discursive inversion and repressive desublimation that gave the time its peculiar feeling of euphoria, then this too is over.  What remains in the aftermath of a preterite orbitalization, suggests Pynchon, is not a textual subject but the fleshly human being, "an animal after all, with a full set of pain receptors," charged with the responsibilities of care, stewardship, and concerted resistance to inertial force (physical, social, or political).  This shift of emphasis is not registered in the text at the level of content, nor does it suggest that somehow the body is more at stake in Vineland than it is in the earlier, more textually reflexive novels.  In many respects, Vineland presents its readers with a familiar literary world: preterite figures in an overdetermined landscape attempting to cope with the forces of entropy both within themselves and without.  But these preterite and entropic elements do not function in the same way at the level of expression, where the ground of Pynchon's discourse has shifted, and what is meant by a "world" is now a nondiscursive element in an extrinsic or exclusive relation to the text.  The body, social order, "reality and history" exist not as limits invaginated in language  but as previously constituted entities and concepts outside language, and therefore as discourses given the distinction of a nondiscursive being.

The "sixties" as a period is the novel's first example of this discursive outside, since rather than designating a temporal mode of heterological breach that catches up its historian, sociologist, artist, writer, or critic in the time of his or her own epistemological desire, it finds itself reduced to a content or attribute without a performing dimension.  The nuance here is that performativity itself constitutes the reduced content; in being about the 1960s as a discursive time, Pynchon's text excludes in the act of thematizing a form of expression that presumes an intrinsic or internal relation to its own ground, a "history" grasped as that form and in the act of writing.  This is why Vineland seems like the earlier novels in its subject matter and style and yet clearly strikes so different a note.  It thematizes the mediated nature of the 1960s by filtering it through stories and anecdotes told by its middle-aged "veterans" to teenage interlocutors, and indeed it (literally) appropriates their narrative reconstructions, takes over their nostalgic voices, and becomes another veteran of the time; but in this appropriation, the novel itself ceases to subsume its own perspective in the distorting element of story and discourse, linking the latter instead to an autonomizing repetition compulsion that it historicizes.  The "real" period of the 1960s then begins to emerge in a light that, however filtered, can nonetheless reveal the filters themselves, expose their effects in a nontextualized social field, and indicate a possible transcendence not actualized in the period itself."

continued . . .
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