VLVL2 (15): They-system

[Tim Strzechowski]

from Molly Hite, "Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland" (The Vineland Papers, pp. 135 - 153)

[...]

"In Vineland, complicity is a fact of life, but it is not inevitable any more than it is advertent. The exorbitantly self-justifying Flash makes the point when he comments, 'We're in th' Info Revolution here.  Anytime you use a credit card you're tellin' the Man more than you meant to' (74).  Technology has brought government and corporate surveillance to such a pitch that snitching has become outmoded, if not redundant.  On the other hand, in Vineland complicity is not by definition total and does not by definition rule out resistance.  In contrast to Gravity's Rainbow, where the only possibility for opposition seemed rooted in a prehistoric, or pre-Western historic, purity, associated with primal Nature and emblematized by such figures as 'the Great Serpent holding its own tail in its mouth' (GR 412) or the pre-Olympian Titans, Vineland suggests that originary purity was always a delusion.

[...]

'The They-system that aims to infantilize an entire nation into unquestioning obedience -- to produce 'a timeless, defectively imagined future of zero-tolerance drug-free Americans all pulling their weight and all locked in to the official economy, inoffensive music, endless family specials on the Tube, church all week long, and, on special days, for extra-good behavior, maybe a cookie' (221-22) -- still somehow engenders children who repudiate the official father, if in commodified Tubal language.  Prairie's initial response to Brock Vond, as he hovers wraithily over her, is 'But you can't be my father, [. . .] my blood is type A.  Yours is Preparation H' (376).

In the universe of Vineland, corrupted and even co-opted innocence can still turn against Man, and this Man is clearly identified with current political figures -- and clearly identified as not-'us.' [...] [I]f Vineland is, as McHale has commented, a sixties novel, it is not thereby a novel that, as Joseph Tabbi charges, takes 'an imaginative shortcut [. . .] an acceptance of a ready-made audience that frees [Pynchon] from the responsibility of creating the sensibility by which he will be understood.'  In Vineland Pynchon is again working to create a sensibility, but it is a political sensibility, one that tacitly acknowledges the possibility of bad faith in subsuming considerations of exploitation to considerations of mortality.  Vineland is Pynchon's most irreducibly political novel because of its vision of the sixties, but this vision, ironic and critical as well as celebratory, is less a source of nostalgia than a basis for reference and comparison [...] The novel offers certain framed takes on a pivotal period in recent history, a period in which a number of alternatives to the dominant culture and society were proposed, tried out, questioned, and often betrayed.  Unlike Gravity's Rainbow, it does not offer a We-system that will accommodate all possible readers -- that will involve 'everybody' equally in its acknowledgments of victimization and oppression.  What it does offer is an explicit and articulated They-system, a political analysis, an examination of social and historical differences.

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