VLVL2 (15): Happy Ending

[Tim Strzechowski]

Eric Solomon, "Argument by Anachronism: The Presence of the 1930s in Vineland."  The Vineland Papers (pp. 161 - 166)

[...]

"Vineland draws to a close with all the surviving old lefties, Traverses and Beckers, holding their picnic to honor a simpler time, to celebrate a bond between two thirties Wobblies.  The relatives come 'from Marin to Seattle, Coos Bay to downtown Butte, choker setters and choppers, dynamiters of fish, shingle weavers and street corner spellbinders, old and beaten at, young and brand-new' (369) to listen to the aging radicals give an annual reading of a passage from Emerson -- that quintessential American idealist -- quoted in a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James -- that quintessential  American pragmatist.  As the old-timers argue the tired 1930s radical questions about whether the United States still lingers in 'a prefascist twilight' (371), or whether darkness has fallen, past and present, thirties and eighties, Hitler and Roosevelt or Reagan and Kissinger, commingle.

"Prairie's generation, represented by the rock musician Isaiah Two-Four, rejects Frenesi's era: 'you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out there for it -- but you sure didn't understand much about the Tube' (373).  The 1960s made films, the 1980s videos -- but behind all the media events are the Wobbly broadsheets and songbooks, the radical political dreams of 1930s proletarian writers; dreams of Traverses and Beckers, of Wobblies and longshoremen, of Sasha and Hub Gates, of Emerson and Joe Hill.  Indeed, the nove's sub-coda may be Joe's last words: 'Don't mourn for me, organize.'  For Brock Vond, government fascist extraordinaire, his right-wing 'exercise' fails, called off by Reagan.  Thus, a right-wing revolution clapses just as the New Left had.  Brock's leader, his god, his president, has failed him, a subtle mockery of the disappointed loss of belief in communism represented by late thirties defections from the Party and documented in a collection of essays by betrayed believers such as Silone, Malraux, Wright, and Orwell, entitled The God That Failed.  So Brock's leaders betray him into the hands of the Thanatoids.

"The villain is gone; the good folk have their momentary stay from modern political and social confusion, in the rural safety of a thirties retreat.  The novel ends happily, as the old movies were wont to do.  And Desmond, Prairie's and Zoyd's old dog, frightened away months ago by federal prosecutor Vond and Drug Enforcement forces, returns:  "Prairie woke to a warm and persistent tongue all over her face.  It was Desmond, none other, the spit and image of his grandmother Chloe, roughened by the miles, face full of blue-jay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home' (385).  All 1980s and 1960s political, social, and sexual passions spent, the survivors of left-wing struggles are safe in 1930s pastures.  Lassie has come home."

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