VLVL2 (4): Lines of Flight (part 2)

[Tim Strzechowski]

continuing . . .

"That repetition is a "subtext" of Vineland can be inferred from the novel's epigraph, a message outside the text that comes in the form of a quotation from a song by the rhythm-and-blues singer Johnny Copeland: "Every dog has his day, / and a good dog / just might have two days."  The doubleness adverted to here resonates forward into the kaleidoscopic story of Zoyd Wheeler, his daughter Prairie, her mother Frenesi, her mother's friend DL, and their complicated relations to that avatar of an invested social repression, the federal prosecutor Brock Vond.  But the resonance is doubly complicated by a further connotative question: what does it mean to be a "good" dog, to live in an ethical manner such as one's repetitions bear on a community in fruitful and caring ways?  This question has perhaps been present in all of Pynchon's novels, but the answer given here, once again, is qualitatively different.  The implication of the text in an objectifying and dehumanizing violence, like the complicities of the characters, unfolds through a rereading of implication and complicity, an encasement of parodic strategies within a heightened realism.  Repetition is still at work, but it now clearly understands its utopian project in terms of a responsibility to an underlying narrative of political continuity.

"The action of this rereading is felt most distinctively in the exclusive difference between abstraction on the one hand ("Tubal" distraction by the mesmerizing media of television and computers, the "wide invincible gaze practiced by many sixties children, meaning nearly anything at all, useful in a lot of situations, including ignorance" [214], the musical reveries, surfer's raptures, and various "mind hard-ons" cataloged in the novel) and on the other a "cause-and-effect" history in which the apparatuses of social control articulate their simulacral structures.  This historical ground, while in most ways the same reifying array of bureaucracies, military or national security institutions, industrial installations, and spectral marketplaces dramatized in Gravity's Rainbow, differs to the degree that its historicity in Vineland is assumed within the causal terms it projects and establishes for itself.  A reification of time is thus legible in Pynchon's construction of a reifying social and political power.  Human beings in the novel are dehumanized in causal time; the "human" is not already a dehumanization in the establishment of time as causal.  They are not charicatures but characters, despite the intertextuality of their funny names and the improbability of the things that happen to them, and as such they instantiate nondiscursive singularities in his discourse."  [...]  (pp. 220-22)

"That part of Pynchon's intent in Vineland is to reread his earlier work as examples of the countercultural moment can be inferred from the novel's allegorical dimension, the way that "master narratives" become a subtext of stories like Frenesi's, in which the desire for mastery or the master (Brock Vond) plays itself out in a text conspicuously preoccupied with mediation, with telling stories about the past, and with the question of what stories best respesent a community to itself.  The use of parody and farce in the novels from the 1960s, their metonymic substitutions whereby each text becomes a preterite character alongside its preterite characters, the subversions of analogy, signification, communication -- all these elements point to repetitions of a metalinguistic world that make of their own complicity the ground of a critical apprehension.  Pynchon in Vineland could be said to stage the limits of these paractic strategies, to implicate them in the satellitized orbit of that crazy astronomer and so in the functions of an authoritarianism that ripens through the following decades." [...]  (p. 226)




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