More Vineland

[J Tracy]

A look at The Traverse and Becker Families the Wobblies, McCarthyism and Sasha’s centrality to historic context in the novel..\


After Prairie heads south with Isaiah 2:4 ( sword into plowshare, nations not to study war anymore) the attention moves to the sad life of Frenesi as funding under Reagan for FBI dark ops reduces, and she longs for freedom and recalls her past and what brought her where she is.  We particularly look into the history of her mother Sasha and that side of her family history. These memories offer a colorful human look at US political history and class struggles stretching back into maybe the 30s but implying the history of the IWW/Wobblies  which goes back further. In the novel Against the Day the same family is involved in the same class struggle leading up to and through WW1.  We find that Sasha’s father was a Wobbly organizer of loggers who was effective enough to draw Pinkerton gunfire while camping along Mad River, (which empties into a large beach where I spent many hours with my wife and children along with many hours rafting, camping  or swimming further back along the river into the coast hills). In what must have been the most traumatizing and permanent impact on Sasha and her mother we hear the story of how a guy working for the employer’s association felled a log on her father Jess Traverse and crushed his legs. For her, class war was no abstraction, and later there is a shift in her consciousness as it becomes more obvious that oppressive power structures  are all specific humans making specific choices .  As a young woman Sasha moves south to ”the city” (LA), gets involved in union organizing and strikes from the San Joaquin to further South.  During WW2 the war puts a clamp on union activity and Sasha works as a lounge singer. Frenesi is looking for the romance that brought her parents together but Sasha drains that picture with her realism about a relationship where she had misread her husband Hubbel and with whom she shared little depth or common ground. He married her because she was a looker with little care for her as a whole person and no comradeship with her values and politics. 
    “The war changed everything. The deal was, no strikes for the duration. Lot of us thought it was some last desperate capitalist maneuver, a way to get the Nation mobilized under a Leader, no different than Hitler or Stalin. But at the same time, so many of us really loved FDR.” (Sasha speaking)
(p. 77).  
Both Sasha and Hubble work in Hollywood
   “To Sasha the blacklist period, with its complex court dances of fuckers and fuckees, thick with betrayal, destructiveness, cowardice, and lying, seemed only a continuation of the picture business as it had always been carried on, only now in political form. Everyone they knew had made up a different story, to make each of them come out looking better and others worse. “History in this town,” Sasha muttered, “is no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and it comes about in the same way—soon as there’s one version of a
story, suddenly it’s anybody’s pigeon. Parties you never heard of get to come in and change it. Characters and deeds get shifted around, heartfelt language gets pounded flat when it isn’t just removed forever. “(p. 81)

We get a taste of how all this politicization translated in Sasha’s home life into personal anger, troubled memories, snide comments  and angry arguments with her husband. My wife’s father was both a logger and worked in Iron Mines (where the union was stronger and pay better) lot of injuries among friends when logging, coughing up Iron dust from mining work. Despite a life of hard work they were poor. 

This is the background that led to the political convergence that elected FDR, and provoked a retrenchment of  reactionary power brokers among the upper class. Pynchon reminds us that America was not always a middle class society and that that vision of large scale social justice has always incurred powerful  resistance.  During and after WW2 The CIA , FBI and compliant politicians built a secretive  and public propaganda movement around anti-communism and worked with 3rd reich fascists to overthrow socialist leaning governments around the world and crush US dissent with unconstitutional secret police methods ranging from mind reprogramming and character assassination, to the preparation of concentration camps, to murder ( IMO JFK) of any  who stood for serious change. Despite all the talk of Russia or China, that was never where the blood was shed. All of these methods and battles are part of Vineland.  We also get a taste of the savior/hero in uniform/attraction to the strong protector complex that Pynchon perhaps too misogynistically outlines in Sasha, Frenesi and other women characters. 
 


> On Feb 4, 2026, at 12:27 AM, J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:
> 
> So as I mentioned, I am re-reading Vineland, and finding details in the back stories that are drawing my interest and attention more this time around. I am glad there are others reading Vineland and commenting  and hope disagreements can be respectful and enjoyable. I already wrote a bit about my overall take on the novel and its thematic continuity with other P novels and will be adding some more specific thoughts and areas of focus as I read and ponder. 
> 
> Zoyd- 1) has to renew his qualifications as disabled every year and does so with certain flair by acts of defenestration, this is humiliating but we find he is doing so to protect an agreement by which he survives in obscurity  removing him and his daughter from a past with LA cops and Federal agents. The defenestration feels loaded to this reader. He is both breaking the law and at the same time limiting the ability of the agents of law to completely bury him. He was more someone who was thrown out of his place in society than someone who broke away. He married a beautiful revolutionary  from a family of lefties who got turned into an agent of  FBI  Cointelpro type program and appears to have made a profoundly miserable choice for herself and those ho actually care for her. Zoyd got caught in the crossfire.
>  I find Zoyd both unimpressive and sympathetic. He has many friends, knows his small community, loves his daughter, is a versatile survivor-band keyboardist, carpenter, crayfish hunter,  and has a sharp sense of humor. His deep sadness over his lost love is not being handled in a good way, alcoholism, shallow sexuality, pot, un handled debts.  He has a powerful internal feistiness against authoritarianism though he is no idealist, no revolutionary  and would rather avoid trouble. It is this quality that oddly distinguishes him from Frenesi’s more self-serving connection to anti fascist rebellion.
> 
> Suddenly his worst fears have come to town with hectoring Hector Zuniga( our introduction to the role of TV and cop shows in US culture),  possibly Frenesi, and Brock Vond.  He is not passive in the face of this, He sends his teenage daughter away with a rock band leader to a gig he helped set up. , giving her a card from the strange figure of Takeshi, and moves out of his house. 
> 
> Kahuna Airlines  and Japan Airlines  flight 1628 -  Pynchon loves the weird, the intersection of  the real strange and the fictional/mythical strange, probing at how our imaginations and possible other dimensions interact with what is deemed normal and real. One of the telling and rich threads of Vineland involves the character Takeshi Fumimota  whose name appears over 130 times  ( I lost count)  He first appears during an act of air piracy on Kahuna airlines where he escapes the attention of the pirates by sitting in with Zoyd on uke ( P has a thing for ukulelesTraverse as Z entertains passengers with his keyboard. This was written in the 80s and there was an interesting incident over Alaska  where the crew of a transport plane of Japan airlines saw 3 ufo type crafts near their 747 . It was rare in that the unknown crafts were tracked on radar and the description by the pilot and crew was detailed. Seems a likely candidate as inspiration for this humorous and slightly ominous scene. Hectors card is important to the plot.
> 
> OK enough for today. Plenty of fun stuff in these opening doings along with the sad story of Zoyd’s  last try to contact Frenesi.  Next up  a look at The Traverse and Becker Families the Wobblies and Sasha.
>