VL-IV pgs. 98/99: Postmodern Mysticism

[Robin Landseadel]

My sense of postmodernism kicked in around 1969. My math/reading  
teacher handed me a copy of Catch-22. I loved the book. My main  
takeaway was the emerging awareness of how profoundly degenerate war— 
any war— is, and a nagging sense that corporations were at the corrupt  
center of this decay, that they were an innately entropic force. Up  
until reading Catch-22 I assumed that the Allies were the Good Guys in  
World War II, that what happened in the popular imagination at the  
time as represented by movies, paintings, magazine articles/ 
photographs, Bugs Bunny cartoons—what I sucked up by age 14—was the  
true and verifiable history of this legendary global conflagration.   
Reading Gravity’s Rainbow kicked it all up a notch or two—you can see  
I.G. Farben’s bloody claw on Prescott Bush’s shoulder well before you  
get into the Zone.

In part postmodernism is looking at the Modern era through the  
mentality of the post-hippie scare, our nation’s collective freak-out  
in the wake of acid, duly noted by the post-Count Drugula Mucho Maas  
on pages 313 and 314 of Vineland. The us/them divide was pretty clear  
and pretty wide at the time, what with straights and freaks and little  
in-between, leastaways if you were even a little bit awake the time.  
Note that Zoyd and Mucho’s big takeaway from the LSD experience was  
profoundly spiritual. The two of them—as did many others did at the  
same time—had religious visions.

Something Happened, as Joseph Heller noted, and that particular  
Something Happened at a particular time, the era of Vietnam and  
Richard Nixon. The current state of trust—our collective lack of trust— 
in institutions of power and control is the sort of rejection of old  
paradigms that I perceive as the condition of Postmodernism.

This loss of faith goes right to the heart of established religion,  
inevitably leading to heretical impulses. I would gather that Thomas  
Ruggles Pynchon has an intense personal interest in heresy, being that  
his most famous ancestor is famous primarily as a heretic.  For  
whatever reason, people throughout the world have always had these  
“deep nudges from forces unseen”, and from Oedipa Mass and the  
Nefastis Box that sends Oed reeling into the night to the comely  
Ecstatica Madam Natalia Eskimoff and the rest of the T.W.I.T.s that  
populate “Against the Day”, Pynchon pays particular attention to the  
modes of communication with the invisible empire that these various  
and sundry interested parties deploy in their magickal operations.

The one thing I’ve been tracking in Pynchon right from the get-go was  
just how many occult references there are in all of his writing,  
usually placed in the text just so’s you understand that the author  
knows way more about the subject than he’s going to let on right now— 
revelation can wait. And one of the primary indicators of that  
fondness for all things occult can be found in Pynchon’s frequent use  
of mirrors.

The mirror scene at the Wayvone wedding is just that sort of scene.  
There have been many references to scrying all through Pynchon’s  
writing, and mirrors of various types are the screen of psychic  
projection when scrying.

So Prairie is in the bathroom of the Wayvone estate:

	. . .up the hill a level or two, standing semidistraught in front of
	an ornately framed goldveined mirror, one of a whole row, in a
	powder room or ladies' lounge of stupefying tastelessness. . .

Mirror, mirror on the wall:

	Prairie tried bringing her hair forward in long bangs, brushing the
	rest down in front of her shoulders, the surest way she knew, her
	eyes now burning so blue through the fringes and shadows, to
	creep herself out, no matter what time of the day or night, by
	imagining that what she saw was her mother's ghost. And that
	if she looked half a second too long, it would begin to blink while
	her own eyes stayed open, its lips would start to move, and then
	speak to her stuff she was sure she'd rather not hear ....

	Or maybe that you've ached all your life to hear but you're still
	scared of? the other face seemed to ask, lifting one eyebrow a
	fraction more than Prairie could feel in her own face. Suddenly,
	then, behind herself, she saw another reflection, one that might've
	been there for a while, one, strangely, that she almost knew. She
	turned quickly, and here was this live solid woman, standing a little
	too close, tall and fair, wearing a green party dress that might have
	gone with her hair but not with the way she carried herself, athletic,
	even warriorlike, watching the girl in a weirdly familiar, defensive
	way, as if they were about to continue a conversation. . .

. . . Prairie’s act of scrying summons up her magical aide, her  
warrior and protector, the Genie with magical skills, the ability to  
turn invisible and turn back the hands of time. The Ninjette DL will  
lead us back to Fenesi Gates. This reminds me more than a little of  
the Mirror of Erised in “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorcerer’s  
Stone”, where Harry’s deepest wish is to be connected to his [now  
deceased] parents.

If Vineland—”my harmless little interrestial scherzo”—seems to end  
with a fairy tale, maybe it’s because Vineland is a fairy tale.