Pynchon's politics, as exhibited in Vineland

[Dave Monroe]

>From Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to
the X-Files (New York: Routledge, 2000), Chapter 1,
"Conspiracy/Culture," Section II, "Vineland and
Visibility," pp. 57-75 ...

"The hidden depths and concelaed realms which might
encourage countercultural fantasies of a
conspiratorial 'We-system' (as Gravity's Rainbow
termed it) have thus all but disappeared in the world
of Vineland.  Everything has become exposed (to use a
film metaphor to which the novel itself is highly
attuned) ....  On this reading, then, the final
failure of the 1960s underground culture comes about
not through any of the conspiratorial fanstasies of
apocalypse which the counterculture predicted, but
because there is nowhere left to hide.  Everything is
visible, and everything is connected, producing a
situation in which a routine sense of paranoia is
paradoxically both no longer necessary, and more vital
than ever." (p. 73)

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