VL-IV pgs. 98/99: Postmodern Mysticism

[Joseph Tracy]

Good stuff here, Robin. A 60's -1984 fairy tale feels like a very  
valid way to look at this book. A fairy tale for the children of the  
counter-culture.

  I only wish the mistrust of the the US as the worlds leading force  
for truth, freedom,etc and the purported mistrust of the standard  
religious/philosophical  paradigms was deeper and  more widespread,  
and that it really did embody a "postmodern" era. I see it more as a  
subculture or counterculture but the degree to which it even rises to  
that level is open to argument.  But  for most of history every  
generation and every individual goes through this process and choice  
to some degree, and the power with which the entire world is changed  
by the pressure of certain cultural forces ( nuclear weapons,  
worldwide communication, world wars, TV,  satellites/ moonwalks, the  
sub -atomic world) is real.

In some ways Vineland is showing the historic roots of American  
rebellion against empire, the universal effects of entropy, and the  
qualities of human nature that  have all countered and modified   
Orwell's nightmare vision. But the eerie accuracy of Orwell's fairy  
tale also infuses the work. One thing I like about P is the the  
universality of his heresies. No one escapes the the corrupting  
influence of the forces they seek to oppose, or the comic bounce and  
wiggle of entropy, mistaken identity, lethal weaponry and the babies  
of wackiness.

The fact that he opens so many doors to other worlds/other realities  
is for me, as for many, one of his most endearing,  and 60's  
qualities  and also something that most reviewers don't really seem  
to get. It is also realistic in a way that realism falls short of by  
closing the doors P leaves open.  In that regard I appreciate Robin's  
in depth look at the occult/spiritual/altered state references.  For  
me all these are united by the underlying concept of Karma.  One of  
the subjects I see P exploring here  and throughout his writing is  
the difficulty of revenge and violence as a tool for balancing or  
countering violent abuse.
  What is nasty in this equation is the historic and obvious  
effectiveness of violence of which cointelpro is one front of a very  
violent empire.

One of the things that bothers me about post-modernism is the  
imagination that US culture was well past the nasty violence of  
Vietnam, WW1,  that the ability to mount something like the Iraq war  
was impossible with a savvy, skeptical media and public. On the other  
hand there seems to be growing world wide resistance to empire and  
war and the accompanying paradigms.

As far as fairy tales and "art" and the role of these in history, I  
think P is realistic in seeing it as the omnipresent mixed and  
swirled influence it really is.  Truth is mediated  for P and I think  
for everyone by a pretty mixed narrative blend: the detritus of  
culture, technology, the lines of power, the mysteries of ecstatic  
experience. So a modern fairy tale looks into this magic mirror  and  
if it is good enough we  go through  hang out on the other side and  
come out  seeing more clearly. Any mirror that tells you that you are  
the fairest of them all is a piece of shit, as is any mirror that  
tells you you have no power, no choice, no hope.

The snow white story is also about the resistance to change and the  
inevitability of change and the one way mirrors of surveillance
On Jan 17, 2009, at 11:52 AM, Robin Landseadel wrote:

> 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.
>