Nostalgia & Nemesis: Vineland & Stone Junction Turn 30

[j e l]

this is from 2020 so please forgive me if it was already posted way back
when but STONE JUNCTION is worth the read.  VL and SJ were both published
in 1990. Pyn~chon does the Introduction to the paperback edition.

https://thequietus.com/opinion-and-essays/anniversary/thomas-pynchon-vineland-jim-dodge-stone-junction-anniversary-review/

Nostalgia & Nemesis: Vineland & Stone Junction Turn 30

Sean Kitching
Published 7:36am 9 March 2020

When I first picked up Gravity’s Rainbow at the age of 19, I found it
exhilarating and bewildering in equal measure. A hybridisation of
historical text, scientific theory and counter-cultural encyclopaedia,
rendered in hyper-dense prose that was often closer to the delirious highs
and lows of an acid trip than a conventional novel, the 760-page archetypal
postmodernist beast nevertheless defeated me on my first attempt.

It sat on the bookshelf for two or three months whilst my mind got over its
indigestion. When I picked it up again, I sailed through the remaining
two-thirds drinking in all the wonder it had to offer. Probably more than
any other novel, Gravity’s Rainbow is cited by readers and authors alike as
being the book they would most like to finish reading, but whose end has
always proved elusive. For those willing to invest the necessary time,
however, and who also accept that the novel’s richness is almost impossible
to appreciate in a single reading, the rewards it offers far outweigh the
initial investment of effort.

Once you get past the initial difficulty, it becomes endlessly entertaining
in a way that may only ruin your appreciation of less ambitious authors.
Pynchon’s work also repays subsequent re-readings more than any other
novelist I can think of, and revisiting his writing offers a lifetime’s
engagement for those so inclined. Pynchon also opened up a whole world of
other writers for me – John Barth, William Gaddis, William H. Gass, Robert
Coover, David Foster Wallace – and his introduction to Jim Dodge’s Stone
Junction (“like being at a non-stop party in celebration of everything that
matters”) likewise served to acquaint me with another author whose work
struck a deep chord.

The seventeen years between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland, had critics
chomping at the bit, yet the book itself disappointed many. The author’s
penchant for anonymity, combined with the lengthy interim between books,
had critics speculating all kinds of possibilities. Salman Rushdie wrote in
the New York Times in 1990: “We heard he was doing something about Lewis
and Clark.”

Other rumours concerned a 900 page novel about the American civil war, and
some academics were holding out for nothing less than a postmodern
equivalent of Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake. Vineland, with its cast of oddball
Californian characters looking back from the perspective of the Reagan era
to the 60s, with its dearth of ‘serious cultural allusions’, favouring
instead a pop-culture brew of real and imagined musical, filmic and
televisual references, was not that book.

Reviewers asked: was this what Pynchon had spent 17 years writing? In
retrospect, it now seems likely that Vineland was only one of the projects
that Pynchon had been working on during those 17 years. Two weightier works
followed. Mason & Dixon appeared seven years later, and Against The Day
another sixteen years on from Vineland. Against The Day is arguably the
postmodern Finnegan’s Wake that critics had hoped Pynchon would one day
produce, and along with Gravity’s Rainbow, is one of Pynchon’s two true
masterpieces.

Yet they are but two novels in the total continuum of Pynchon’s universe.
Viewed as part of a greater, connected work, Vineland remains the most
human and emotionally poignant of Pynchon’s novels, whilst simultaneously
being a far more sophisticated examination of how the changing nature of
the recorded image impacted upon the ideals of the 60s than it at first
appears. It is also, along with Pynchon’s The Crying Of Lot 49, a far more
accessible place for the uninitiated to begin.

Nostalgia in general, and for the sixties especially, is rightly viewed as
critically suspect. Nostalgia for an era like the 60s is often felt more
strongly in times like the Reagan era or the current Trump presidency due
to the stark contrast between idealistic hope and reactionary control. It
could also be argued that the sixties continues to exert an attraction as
it offered a time when it was perhaps easier to tell the ‘bad guys’ from
the good. Certain eras do exert a valid particular attraction in both
cultural and philosophical terms, however.

1960s America was a time when radical change felt possible, even if only
for a short time. Experiments with LSD and psilocybin appeared to open up
new possibilities for personal growth and spiritual understanding. Seeing
one’s personal psychological make-up in terms of imprinted possibilities,
rather than absolute certainties, played a huge role in American youth’s
rejection of a paradigm that included sending many off to their deaths in
Vietnam. As Mucho Maas (a character from Lot 49) says: “No wonder the state
panicked. How are they going to control a population that knows it will
never die?” Looking back at those times, from the perspective of 1984, the
year of Ronald Reagan’s re-election, Vineland is no simple exercise in
longing for a simpler, more idealistic era, but something more complex that
identifies the factors that contributed to the fading of those beliefs,
whilst recognising the complicity of its characters (and even its author)
in that process.

Hippie musician, Zoyd Wheeler, lives in California with his 14-year-old
daughter Prairie. Coerced by villainous federal agent, Brock Vond, to stay
away from Prairie’s mother, Frenesi Gates, Zoyd must “do something publicly
crazy” every year in order to keep collecting his benefit cheque. During
the 60s, Frenesi was part of a militant film collective known as 24fps that
attempted to capture fascist transgressions on film. Doomed by her mutual
attraction to Brock Vond, Frenesi becomes a double agent and is forced to
spend much of her life until the present day in witness protection. Her
disappearance, a result of Reagan-era cutbacks to such programs, leads to
Vond’s resurfacing, along with another ex-agent, Hector Zuñiga, who appears
to have escaped from a Tubal detox centre, and is intent on enlisting
Zoyd’s aid in finding his ex, so that she can star in a film he believes he
is producing. Zoyd’s ‘speciality’ is transfenestration, or jumping through
closed windows, shattering the glass. After his latest jump, Zoyd watches a
collection of highlights of his previous attempts: “at each step into the
past the color and other production values getting worse, and after that a
panel including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track-and-field
coach live and remote from the Olympics down in L.A. discussing the
evolution over the years of Zoyd’s technique”. Thus, early on in the novel,
Zoyd witnesses the transference of his own personal experience, albeit
caught in the act of fulfilling a deal he had made with the Feds, to the
world of the Tube.

Vond and Zuñiga aside, the real villain of Vineland is the Tube (always
written with a capital T). Pynchon expresses the fall from radical sixties
idealism by contrasting the idealistic notion of the filmic image held by
the members of 24fps, with the ubiquity and hypnotic power of the Tube by
the time of the mid-80s. The members of 24fps believed that: “When power
corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive
memory device, the human face. What viewer could believe in the war, the
system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these
mugshots bought and sold?”

Later in the book, Prairie’s punk rocker boyfriend, Isaiah Two Four puts
the argument in very stark terms: “Whole problem ‘th you folks’s
generation… is you believed in your Revolution, put your lives right out
there for it – but you sure didn’t understand much about the Tube. Minute
the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, the whole alternative America,
el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies,
and even in 1970s dollars – it was way too cheap”.

Thanatoids, essentially the lingering spirits of the dead, spend “at least
part of every waking hour with an eye on the Tube”, to the extent that a
sitcom about Thanatoids would just be “scenes of Thanatoids watchin’ the
Tube.” These were statements applicable to the mid-eighties, when a
third-rate movie actor was president of the United States, but if we want
to sound out their accuracy against how far further we have come down that
road, the following comment made about Donald Trump by self-confessed
political dirty trickster, Roger Stone (in the Netflix documentary about
him), is chilling in its brazenness:

“Think of the way he looked in that show [The Apprentice]. High backed
chair, perfectly lit, great make-up, great hair. Making decisions. Running
the show. He looks presidential. Do you think voters, non-sophisticates,
make a difference between entertainment and politics?”

Pynchon always had an interest in blurring the boundaries between ‘high’
and ‘low’ culture, and there are numerous occasions, when reading Against
The Day, for example, when the reader ponders if the author might actually
have spent quite a few of those years MIA from the literary scene, at home
smoking marijuana and watching the Tube himself. The numerous references to
Star Trek for example, or the appearance of a suspiciously familiar
character in ATD named Al Mar-Fuad, who dresses in English hunting tweeds
and a deerstalker cap, while brandishing a shotgun and mispronouncing the
letter r.

One of Vineland’s running jokes is the fictitious evening movie, often
poking fun at such collisions of high and low culture, like: “Pee-wee
Herman in The Robert Musil Story.” From his appearance on The Simpsons
(with a paper bag with a question mark on it over his head), to his writing
of liner notes for albums such as Lotion’s Nobody’s Cool, Pynchon surely
always considered himself a part of popular culture. That he offers no
clear way out of the predicament he has identified, even in the most
overtly political of his novels, is unsurprising, given his modus operandi
of describing characters caught up in processes outside of their
understanding.

One of the very few ‘serious cultural references’ comes in the form of the
following quote from William James’ The Varieties Of Religious Experience:

“Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the
divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and
proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to
heave the bar.”

This is essentially Transcendentalism, a 19th-century American
philosophical position that upholds a belief in the inherent goodness of
people and nature, whilst casting suspicion on society and its institutions
as corrupters of the purity of the individual – a position that shares
similarities with anarchism. Pynchon has sometimes been characterised as a
libertarian, due to his anti-government stance. The libertarian’s belief in
rugged individualism is often criticised as forcing people into an
‘atomistic’ existence, apart from communal institutions and activities.
Given that Pynchon’s foremost response to the tyrannical and unjust control
of a force that attempts to govern, is the spinning of alternative stories
and myths of counterculture cooperations to counteract a coerced grand
narrative, this doesn’t ring true. Pynchon’s characters, both the good and
the bad, are not in control of their destinies. Even Vineland’s villainous
Brock Vond is represented as particular psychological type, subject to his
own, (to him) inexplicable inner demons:

“In dreams he could not control, in which lucid intervention was
impossible, dreams that couldn’t be denatured by drugs or alcohol, he was
visited by his uneasy anima in a number of guises, notably as the Madwoman
in the Attic”.


If Vineland can be seen as a novel of the digital age (“It would all be
done with keys on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless,
invisible chains of electronic presence or absence”), Stone Junction is a
stubbornly analogue affair that harks back to more principled, if not
particularly less complicated times. In his introduction to the book,
Pynchon notes: “You will notice in Stone Junction… a constant celebration
of those areas of life that tend to remain cash propelled and thus mostly
beyond the reach of the digital. It may be nearly the only example of a
consciously analogue Novel.”

Describing the book as “a sort of magician’s Bildungsroman”, it’s not
difficult to see the appeal that Stone Junction would have had for Pynchon.
Orphaned in childhood, Daniel Pearse is apprenticed to a series of teachers
who belong to an organisation known as AMO – the Alliance of Magicians and
Outlaws. The skills passed on to Daniel by his unorthodox teachers include
meditation, safecracking, gambling, a highly advanced version of the art of
disguise and eventually, a method of becoming literally invisible.

As Pynchon notes in his introduction, magic for Jim Dodge is not simply a
method of solving plot difficulties, but in fact “hard and honorable work…
[that] cannot be deployed at whim, nor without consequences.” One of the
novel’s greatest achievements is that it presents the wild arc of its
unlikely story in such a fashion that its themes feel familiar, yet when
you try and think of other tales that cover similar ground, it’s hard to
come up with anything that is at all comparable. Secret societies are
hardly uncommon in literature or film, but stories about benevolent secret
societies are almost as rare as tales of utopias that aren’t really
dystopias. Yet plenty of analogous ground to Dodge’s novel does appear
throughout Pynchon’s work. Against The Day has both the “Chums of Chance”
(the ballooning boy heroes reminiscent of 19th century boys’ fiction) and
the “True Worshippers of the Ineffable Tetractys – or T.W.I.T.” – a
mystical society along the lines of Madam Blavatsky’s Theosophical Society
or the Order of the Golden Dawn.

A strong anti-establishment sentiment runs throughout Stone Junction.
Daniel’s mother, Annalee, breaks the jaw of the head nun at Greenfield Home
for Girls, when she tells her she won’t be able to keep her baby. Annalee
is killed as a consequence of her involvement in a plot by her lover,
metallurgist and alchemist Shamus Malloy, to steal some plutonium. Shamus
is perhaps misguided but he is nevertheless driven by a virtuous impulse –
the desire to bring about “the dismantling of all nuclear facilities in the
country.”

The villains and anti-heroes of Stone Junction are less ambiguous than
Vineland’s, yet Dodge’s novel is also more sophisticated than it appears on
the surface. Daniel’s second teacher, Mott Stocker, is a six foot eight
biker outlaw with a penchant for mouth-numbingly hot chilli, psychedelic
drugs, and a strong dislike of Benjamin Franklin. Stocker gleefully burns a
hundred dollar bill with Franklin’s image on it, and would happily
incinerate more were it not for the other financial interests involved in
the deal (recalling the K Foundation’s Burn A Million Quid). Stocker is
certainly the rugged individualistic type, yet in contrast to the novel’s
less morally appealing characters, it is clear that he works cooperatively
within the loosely organised AMO, and that the organisation differentiates
itself from the black and white concept of ‘outlaw’ coopted by the the
American right.

When discussing the potential to make more money on the deal, Low-Riding
Eddie states: “We got a good buy, and you know the rule: Can’t tack on more
than a hundred a pound if the Alliance fronts it… Cools the greed.”
Stocker, like many of his AMO associates, is an anarchist and a force for
chaotic good. As such, he seems cut from an entirely different cloth than
the members of the current ‘Bikers For Trump’ movement.

The villain of Stone Junction is Gurry Debritto, an independent, ex-CIA,
assassin who killed his first man when he was only 12-years-old. Debritto
is a genuinely nasty piece of work, a racist and sexist sadist. He is both
an opposite to Daniel, and an interesting contrast to Brock Vond. Although
Debritto appears less conflicted by his own inner psychological mechanisms
than Vond, he shares a similarly uneasy relationship with his anima to
Vineland’s villain, and the end he ultimately meets is closely tied to this
aspect of his inner self. The AMO has a strong code governing fatal
sanctions against combative individuals: “Ravens are the only adepts that
AMO allows to kill other human beings, and they can only use their
imagination as a weapon.” Ravens are a class of AMO operative that operate
as “Agents of exchange and restitution”. The final event in Gurry
Debritto’s story arc makes good use of the notion of the more powerful
psychedelic drugs being a kind of litmus paper for the soul – delivering
heaven or hell depending on the relationship of the subject to their own
conscience.

As the novel progresses, its plot becomes considerably wilder, entering
realms of fantasy that may be difficult to entertain for readers more
inclined towards literary realism. Unusually for a novel deploying such
fantastical tropes as invisibility and huge, perfect diamonds of possibly
extra-terrestrial origin, Dodge’s purpose remains clear throughout. In one
of the “AMO Mobile Radio” segments that fit in between chapters of the
book, the DJ relates the story of ‘The Snake’, concluding: “True story,
folks. I dedicate it to all of you realists as a reminder that some
gestures transcend failure. I buried the snake in the planter box, fuel for
the flowers.”

The DJ’s words find Jennifer Raine, a troubled young woman who eventually
escapes the asylum in which she is held. Raine has an imaginary daughter
and a lightning shaped scar at the base of her spine, neither of which
anyone but herself and Daniel (when they finally meet) can perceive. The
appearance of Raine as a character initially seems incongruous. Then it
occurs just how clever Dodge is being by incorporating her character as an
anima (and lover) for Daniel. The ‘Madwoman in the attic’ (as in Brock
Vond’s dream) derives from Charlotte Bronte’s Bertha Rochester in Jane
Eyre, and remains a potent image of how insanity was ‘treated’ in the
nineteenth century.

That macho characters such as Brock Vond or Gurry Debritto should fear
their own inner female side certainly rings true, yet there is still
something almost lazy about the ‘madwoman’s’ easy deployment. By including
an anima archetype who is welcomed by, and who participates in a kind of
mutual healing with, the book’s protagonist, Dodge’s use of the ‘madwoman’
metaphor avoids obvious cliche and bravely attempts a neat resolution,
thematically speaking. Even the question of what the diamond that Volta,
the leader of the AMO, tasks Daniel with stealing, actually is, is
answerable given some thought. The diamond, too perfect to have developed
naturally on earth and also beyond scientific manufacture, appears to
represent the possibility of an alien intelligence superior to our own – an
answer to that ultimate question of whether or not we are alone in the
universe.

Whilst Pynchon’s writing style is considerably more idiosyncratic and
sophisticated than Dodge’s, Stone Junction, is in many ways a more
enjoyable and pulse quickening read than Vineland. Taken together though,
the two novels offer a fascinating set of philosophical ideas with which to
consider the 60s era central to them both. It’s tempting to think of the
“alchemical pot-boiler”, Stone Junction, as a kind of wild evening movie
that Vineland’s characters could have sat around watching, and which in
some metaphorical sense, might have provided some useful thematic materials
for understanding the nature of their own predicament. It is perhaps
interesting to note that the only time televisions are referenced in Stone
Junction is when the AMO pilot, Red Freddie, suggests that: “the highest
revolutionary act available to middle-class people in the 1980s would be
piling their television sets in the middle of the street and setting them
ablaze with their front doors.”

xxx

--jel