Pynchon's politics, as exhibited in Vineland

[Dave Monroe]

Literature for the Age of Unease:
Reading Pynchon Today
 
05.4.2006 | Alexander Nazaryan | Literature, Cultural
Affairs 

"If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they
don’t have to worry about answers," runs one of the
Proverbs for Paranoids in Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s
Rainbow. That weird little morsel of advice offered
thirty years ago remains relevant today, as American
society careens with grim surety towards the
Pynchonian vision of freedom as an illusion and
democracy as a script already written by those clever
enough to recognize the fault lines of exploitation.
Since Word War II, no novelist has been more
relentless in parsing out "the engineered character of
history" (in the words of the historian Erik Davis)
and also, of the troubled present, that such a
manufactured history must inevitably portend. 

Although Pynchon has not published a novel in nearly a
decade, I can imagine him surveying the current state
of the union with a measure of bittersweet delight, as
America increasingly shares in his tincture of
paranoia and distrust, from families in Ohio wrapping
their homes in plastic sheeting to protect from a
chemical attack to the ominous anti-terrorism
advertisements that grace the subways of New York.
Since 9/11, the public has been inculcated with a
sense of dread that can only, we are routinely
reminded, be fought back by constant vigilance and
strict adherence to some patriotic sense of decency.
Fear is no longer the only thing we have to fear;
rather, if used for the right ends, fear will make us
good citizens and our country secure. 

Paranoia – fear’s unruly brother – has also made a
return, harkening back to the Cold War and its twin
worries of socialism and nuclear annihilation. But
that paranoia was directed outward to a foreign
specter that was all too glad to appear hugely
sinister in American eyes. Today it is undeniably
introspective, turned to our own country, fueled in no
small part by the knowledge that (just to name one
infraction) President Bush has no apparent qualms
about allowing the NSA to spy on Americans on their
own soil and that the FBI justifies monitoring
left-leaning groups like PETA under the pretense of
hair-thin connections to terrorism. 

But at its heart, ours is a paranoia founded on the
suspicion that the American government is not living
up to even a cursory understanding of what it means to
foster an open society based on all those glorious
concepts we learned about in high school civics
classes. The real importance of Pynchon’s works today
– especially the early Crying of Lot 49 and the
persistently-neglected Vineland and Mason & Dixon –
lies not so much in their undistilled paranoia but in
the constant suggestion that trust on any large scale
is not possible in America anymore. The paranoia of
his characters is not clinical, something to be cured
and alleviated; rather, it is a strategy of survival
in the same basic sense that the Greeks needed a
strategy to defeat the Trojans in The Iliad and
Odysseus needed a strategy to escape the cyclops in
The Odyssey. However, the subjects of Homer’s epics
are heroes, whereas every one of Pynchon’s
protagonists is about as close to a loser as a
literary character can get without being named Leopold
Bloom. But this is precisely what I think makes
reading Pynchon so urgent: his America, minus a few
incredibly unsettling details, is our America, and his
characters are just people who are extremely capable
in wading through the bullshit that surrounds them,
even if the truth they finally unravel reeks even
worse than the initial mess. 

[...]

Sharing its setting with Lot 49, Vineland takes place
in Regan-era California, and a sense of alienation
pervades the novel with the persistence of a fog
settling over the Berkeley hills. By far Pynchon’s
least-read work, Vineland is also his most pointed
critique of a society that allows individuals to
suffer because the national concern is elsewhere, a
society founded on something grand and impersonal, its
ultimate beneficiaries rarely being common folk.
Primarily, Vineland is the story of Frenesi Gates, a
radical who had been involved in a revolutionary film
collective during the widespread campus riots of the
1960’s but, amazingly, ended up falling in love with
Brock Vond, the federal agent who had been assigned to
track her.

Pynchon uses Frenesi’s conflicted character to explore
"what America has been doing to itself, and to its
children, all these years," to borrow from Salman
Rushdie’s appraisal in the New York Times Book Review.
Frenesi has her old leftist leanings, but there she
is, shacked up with Brock in a motel room, and there
is no excuse that could possibly reconcile the two
strands of her being in any meaningful way. Nor should
she expect reconciliation – she was a rebel, the
rebellion failed miserably, and there is no place for
someone like Frenesi in America anymore. 

The harder she tries to make sense of her outcast
state, the more muddled everything becomes. As she
struggles to reach the epicenter of intrigue into
which she has been pulled by Brock – a bizarre world,
even for California, involving ninjas, the walking
dead and an awful cover band named Billy Barf and the
Vomitones – she comes to the realization that "Central
Power [is] merciless as a tornado or a bomb yet
somehow, as she had begun to discover in dreams of
that period, personally aware, possessing life and
will." The closer she comes to that locus of power,
the more her personality is effaced, subsumed by that
power’s lust for knowledge and the final goal of
knowledge, which is complete control:

If patterns of ones and zeroes were "like" patterns of
human lives and deaths, if everything about an
individual could be represented in a computer record
by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to
be up one level at least – an angel, a minor god,
something in a UFO. 

[...]

Of course, plenty of other excellent novelists have
written about how fear and mistrust have seeped into
the American imagination while the public and private
sectors are allowed to frolic like lusty teenagers.
However, no author has been quite as adept as Pynchon
in showing the effects of American practices on
American people and what happens when the basic social
contract between individuals and governments gets an
editing job from some very filthy hands. 

Thinking wishfully, I can imagine a day when the
current trend of fear-mongering and duplicity that
presides over Washington will be reversed in favor of
a sober, honest accounting of where our deepest
national concerns must lie. Maybe that makes a naïve
Jeremiah Dixon out of me, since hope so often runs up
against the brick wall of coldly cynical reality. For
now, anyway, we live in an age of orange alerts and
dirty bombs, and “If you see something, say something”
is the slogan we dubiously carry into battle. Pynchon,
then, is the author to read, for, as a character tells
us in Mason & Dixon, "Only now and then were selected
persons allow’d glimpses of the New World," and no
other living novelist is as unique or relevant to
these strange times of ours. 

http://www.newpartisan.com/home/literature-for-the-age-of-unease-reading-pynchon-today.html

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