More Vineland - College of the Surf, The People's Republic of Rock and Roll, Adam and Eve

[Corbeau Castrum]

I think these are all great points. Joanna Freer's monograph Thomas Pynchon and the American Counterculture discusses the representation of women in Vineland (and in Lot 49), and she writes that "although Pynchon's later work continues to espouse basically pro-feminist values, it also contains stereotyped and fetishised representations of women and the female body" (151). "Particularly problematic from a feminist perspective are narratorial insinuations that female characters take a masochistic pleasure in sexual degradation" (151). "But whether or not any proportion of these stereotyped, pornographic, or unrealistic representations of the female – or even the simple abundance of 'pleasant-looking women' in the novels – actually represents an expression of misogyny on Pynchon's part is a difficult question to answer [...] However, as Stefan Mattessich has pointed out in relation to this very propspect of the parodic use of misogyny in Pynchon's work '[t]he question of complicity returns at every level, and even parody may be fetishized, may even be the supreme fetish, the fetish of the fetish'" (154). Ultimately, Freer argues that when it comes to the representation of women, "disturbing and partially undermining Pynchon's gender commentary is the possibility that the author fundamentally lacks concern that certain gendered qualities should be destabilised" (151).

However, Freer does not argue that Frenesi's betrayal is weakly written and mere reproduction of Eve's betrayal, and in fact cites Sister Rochelle's own retelling of the Fall Narrative from the Kunoichi Sisterhood: "Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam – it was the Serpent.... It was sleazy, slippery man ... who invented 'good' and 'evil,' where before women had been content just to be" (166 in Vineland). There are clearly competing visions of womanhood and femininity in the novel, and Freer cites plenty of other examples in which Pynchon seemingly endorses a feminist pov.

So, is Pynchon incorrect to represent a deep, unconscious or not, (masochistic) attraction by women towards agents of the state (an attraction that her mother Sasha also evinces)? Would any representation of female betrayal necessarily invoke the bad Eve narrative? How might Pynchon have gone about this in a way that is less problematic?

For me, the question always comes down to what Pynchon is trying to do. What would he like to show or express? From my perspective, Vineland is fundamentally a commentary on the fate of the counterculture and its associated radical politics.

We already get some of Pynchon's perspective in the introduction to Slow Learner. The context for this quote is a discussion about dialogic fiction, how "two very distinct kinds of English could be allowed in fiction to coexist" (referring to Kerouac, Bellow, Gold, and Roth) with the sense that it "as not a case of either/or, but an expansion of possibilities. I don't think we were consciously groping after any synthesis, although perhaps we should have been. The success of the 'new left' later in the '60's was to be limited by the failure of college kids and blue-collar workers to get together politically. One reason was the presence of real, invisible class force fields in the way of communication between the two groups" (7).
This slide between literary style and 60s politics is very interesting, and I wonder if telling.

Another comment on the 60s, this time about the (re)popularization of the Beat movement by the hippies: "When the hippie resurgence came along ten years later, there was, for a while anyway, a sense of nostalgia and vindication. Beat prophets were resurrected, people started playing alto sax riffs on electric guitars, the wisdom of the East came back in fashion. It was the same, only different. On the negative side, however, both forms of the movement placed too much emphasis on youth, including the eternal variety" (9).

There's the excellent paragraph in Vineland corresponding to this critique of the youth: "Brok Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep — if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching – need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They'd only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed to some reconditioning" (269).

I wonder to what extent your concerns about the cohesiveness of Frenesi as a character can be answered by her youth and intense self-confidence? That immaturity is great self-belief, great vulnerability, and lack of self-awareness all mixed together.

I'll end this missive with some related notes I wrote down last night:
Pynchon is exhausted, returns to more traditional narrative form/tropes, attempting to write in more trad realist way, feels his attempt to explode narrative convention is exhausted as well
Frenesi as Eve's original sin = ultimate traditional trope
It's Pynchon trying to teach himself to be more mainstream, there's a real desire to be understood in a much more relatable way, to "grope after synthesis."
PR3 = simplified failure because Pynchon is so hurt by the failures of the student movement, i.e. retrospectively they clearly had no chance
He's also very angry at the Weather Underground, whose analogue is the 24fps film collective who are also anarchist bombers (although that aspect is only briefly mentioned, if I remember correctly).
Can we read his representation of Frenesi as a very pointed attack against WU and Bernadine Dohrn and their betrayal of the labor movement?
Pynchon's extreme negativity about himself and his writing occurs in both Slow Learner and also private letters. Perhaps he is very Catholic - the sense of feeling like a mouse. But it feels so inconsistent with the flamboyance and humor of his novels.

Overall, I think Freer is generally correct in saying that Pynchon seems insensitive to the idea that his "recurrent fetishisation of the female body and narration of women in willing submission to the male will inevitably serve to alienate a proportion of his potential reading public" (156).

On Friday, February 20th, 2026 at 23:38, J Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> The good the bad and the Ugly. Tracy unexpectedly falls out of love with Vineland right in the middle. I wish it were not so.
>
> The argument between giri and ninjo in Japanese culture is a thing with its own spin in the west. DL argues for giri even though it is hard to see how it has particularly benefitted her or freed her from a lot of whining , Takeshi seems to ignore the question and find more of an obligation to make the most of the moment. He has not benefitted from giri; his wife left him his boss sent criminals after him. They both see and talk with the angry ghosts of the thanatoid village. If they want to remain undiscovered surely this is the place. He sees opportunity for meaningful work . She does not. ???
>
> Most of the time he couldn’t believe she’d really Done It to him, because even this long way down the line he still had trouble believing in his own death. If she’d killed him, why stick around? If she hadn’t, why put him, a complete stranger, through all this? It was driving him toward what, in fairly close to it now, he could detect as some state of literally mindless joy. There was no way he knew of to experience such joy and at the same time keep his mind. He wasn’t sure this might not be her real mission—to make of his life a koan, or unsolvable Zen puzzle, that would send him purring into transcendence.
>
> At first I found it hard to tell if Vato and Blood, both Vietnam Vets,  are angry ghosts( thanatoids) themselves or if they just remember Ortho Bob from the war but survived themselves.The fact of their dealings with the Thanatoids may place them in between the living and dead, like DL and Takeshi.  Maybe they are psychopomps shuffling people and cars between worlds and also “Out to kick some ass”. Their fear of the Vietnamese lady who works for them is weird and hard for me to understand. (When I lived in Arcata there were a fair number of Vietnamese people living in the area and working at a place where  I worked carving redwood sculptures).
>   The next episode with Vato and Blood conjures older ghosts along this (nonexistant) 7th River where tales of small beings called Woges were told .Woges were  spirit -like beings who lived there before the Yurok came. For more on Yurok and other local cultures, the outsider anthropology of Jaime DeAngulo ( who knew 6 indigenous california dialects from Big Sur to Northern Cal) is powerfully insightful. I would chharacterize the role of V&B as indigenous presences within the colonial world, still connected to the older pre-colonial history, but confused  as they try to fit in to their world and time. Also in this scene along the 7th river we get a sense of the destructive power of water along the desolate stretches of the California Coast referring to real historic and ongoing incidents in the region.  This time V&B recover both a car trapped in an apple tree, and its thanatoid driver who turns out to be Weed Atman, a serious player in Dl and Frenesi’s past. Weed wants to find Takeshi, having heard about the Karmic adjustment business. V&B offer a ride.. There is a reasonable jump to T&DL’s office and then weirdly and in an unexplained temporal and locational shift Prairie, still at the Kunoichi retreat is overhearing DL and Takeshi tell this story about Weed. I guess readers  have to assume Takeshi and DL went back to the Ninjette retreat center.  The center suddenly comes under attack with Helicopters and machine guns. They get away via elevator and trans-am to LA where Takeshi has a previously unmentioned office with high tech stuff. Prairies wants to know more about her mother and is taken to Ditzah Pisk’s suburban house to watch film from her 24fps film archive.
>   It is intriguingly prescient that Pynchon saw the power of who is recording events, telling the story. The cell camera and  has become a major battleground of political activism and public response to police and mainstream political and media narratives. Tremendous effort to shut down Tik Tok, Julian Assange, Gary Webb, Telegram and censor youtube facebook Twitter etc. Today’s major search engines make it almost impossible to get contrarian historical or political viewpoints.  An early example of this was the TIME purchase and reluctance to reveal the Zapruder film of JFK’s murder. Many see it in the differing 9-11 narratives.
>
> Notes to self- 1) theme of betrayal- 24fps betrayed, Howie? Frenesi betrays Weed, Frenesi betrays and is betrayed, Brock betrays Frenesi, is betrayed after College of surf.  DL betrays committment to limited personal self defense, but reluctantly pays price to heal the damage,  Vond /Oliver North  betrays law and constitution preparing concentration camps & martial law. Reagan betrayed film union movement , Caught in secret deals with Iran, then Contra lies, Savings and Loan scandal,
>
> 24fps got involved in the attempted “rebellion” at College of the Surf where Weed Atman taught math. The literary zoom-in to the College of the Surf is a classic Pynchon combination of the ominous and hilarious- the Dewey Weber( surfer 7 surfboard maker) plaza, students listening to the teenage Mickey Mouse club music of Mike Curb and eating baloney on white bread, The Nixon Monument on the edge of the ocean but facing inward ( to the enemy within),the sinister herb, the fateful joint
>
>  “…College of the Surf. Against the somber military blankness at its back, here was a lively beachhead of drugs, sex, and rock and roll, the strains of subversive music day and night, accompanied by tambourines and harmonicas, reaching like fog through the fence, up the dry gulches and past the sentinel antennas, the white dishes and masts, the steel equipment sheds, finding the ears of sentries attentuated(sic) but ominous, like hostile-native sounds in a movie about white men fighting savage tribes.” p.204
>
> A straight student starts screaming; someone tries to insert a joint into her mouth, cops are called and soon students are being hit with batons.
>
> I would say P may be trying to compress too much into a place (College of the Surf) that is too shallow to be credible. No mention of the war other than a ridiculous grad student, and a  too unreal about the larger context: Civil Rights, killing of MLK and 2 Kennedys, Chicago riots, the American Indian Movement attempt to take over Alcatraz, anti-war protests, Dylan, Dead, Beatles, Jefferson Airplane, environmental movement,  challenges to hysteria of anti-communism. There is always a lot of shallow in US culture, fads, pop culture, but there is also always a serious challenge to the shallowness and destructiveness of militarized empires, re-evaluations of values and history,    Is College of the Surf a cartoon meant to be understood as an untrustworthy cartoon.  The gov. crackdown is far more real than any other part of the pr3 narrative.
>
> The scene shifts to Frenesi’s secret rendezvous with Brock Vond in Kansas City, we are several days or weeks into the campus revolt and formation of the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. “Led” with little explanation by Weed Atman ( more shree Rajneesh than politico)who Frenesi is having sex with on behalf of Vond. Vond wants her to bring him Weed’s spirit.   Frenesi resists but is fantasizing in the face of overwhelming contrary evidence of reforming Vond and bringing out his inner child. It is hard to reconcile this behavior  with her upbringing with Sasha and her hard-headed friend DL or others in 24fps and it is all supposed to be about sex. Not as though sex was in short supply for beautiful blue eyed blondes or there were no good looking, able activists. I don’t buy it except as a metaphor for a country equally inscrutable in its internal divisions, equally romantic in its dreams of benign colonialism, salvation through bombing, napalm, agent orange.
>
>  Not only are we supposed to believe in this political /historic naivete from a young woman raised in a family of wobblies, but BV humiliates Frenesi in the nastiest way:  "Remember last time, when I ( BV)told you not to bathe, hm? because I knew you’d be seeing him ( WA)that night, knew he’d go down on you—didn’t he? ate your pussy, hm? of course I know, because he told me. You were coming in his face and he was tasting me all the time.”… then
>
> “You’re the medium Weed and I use to communicate, that’s all, this set of holes, pleasantly framed, this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places.”
>
> Frenesi is already on edge and the idea that she would let this go and not walk out  is very hard to accept. I think Pynchon knows this and interrupts  a scene taking place in dialogue with thoughts from … where? A future Frenesi, a sympathetic omniscient narrator. I t feels like he knows there is a credibility problem  and uses this writer’s trick to convince us her behavior is credible.
>
> “She was too young then to understand what he thought he was offering her, a secret about power in the world. That’s what he thought it was. Brock was young then too. She only took it as some parable about his feelings for her, one she didn’t exactly understand but covered for with the wide invincible gaze practiced by many sixties children, meaning nearly anything at all, useful in a lot of situations, including ignorance.” p. 185
>
> I can’t see how this proposed naivetein Frenesi  squares with the next bit of  sharp witted dialog challenging Brock:
>
> ““It’s why you kill each other, isn’t it?”
> “Who?”
>  “Men. Because you can’t love each other.”
> He shook his head slowly. “Missed the point again—you never get beyond that hippie shit, do you.” “
> Point I didn’t miss,” she finished the thought, “is you prefer to do it by forcing things into each other’s bodies.”
> “I hope that’s a mischievous look.”
>  “Don’t get many of them, do you?”
>
> Far from being lost in reverie or blank, she pointedly goes right for his aggressive mindset, not missing any point and responding to his empty return aggression with more elaboration. She ends by reminding him of his own need for.. well at least mischief, closer to love than using someone like a sexual weapon in a power struggle.
>
> The remainder of the chapter is equally troubling in its attempt to explain Frenesi’s cooperation with this  person she clearly sees as a fascist operative of state violence and control and increasingly struggles to see as someone asleep to his own humanity, a prince to be awakened by her kiss.  Brock sees Weed as the key to the logjam of resistance, a leader who must be dislodged to move the logs down river to be sawed and built into more america. Frenesi sees Weed as a clever role player taking life one day at a time who attracts women and others with little effort or manipulative intent or future plans.
>
>    I can understand this all as a metaphor related to the yin  and yang of human/animal nature or class war  internalized, or militarism versus a more peaceful pursuit of  social balance. My problem is how regularly this struggle shows up in Pynchon’s work with women as the fulcrum. It is too biblically Eve-like. And there are often 3 varieties of Adam to one variety of Eve.
>
> These thoughts are not easy for me to write. I admire the increasing complexity of his woman characters and ATD seems to step outside this Eve pattern with the exception of Lake. However I do not admire Pynchon’s pre-emptive surrender to the systemic inevitability of war and mechanized control  as the unstoppable model of civilization for humans. I think there has always been a divine invasion and a body of persuasive evidence written into the human conscience that refuses the dark fate of ego-driven self annihilation.   He may be right, his arguments run through most of the work and are powerful. His characters face this dilemma and almost all seek escape.
>
> It is hard to sympathize with Frenesi. She aids and abets the  murder of Weed Atman, who  she genuinely likes and is far more smitten with her than Vond; she lies to the unstable ideologue Rex in order to  condemn Weed as a traitor, and gives Rex( the would be king?) a gun to kill Atman.  It is also hard to see any parallel in real betrayals of revolutionary leaders. This kind of betrayal is done by men in any example I can think of. And maybe hardest of all is to see Weed as a credible  leader of a rebellion. There are other problems that turn the whole event into a particulalry silly Simpson’s Cartoon. Where are the College administrators, the campus security people, other teachers, what campus had such a large swath of naive students ready to comply with such a vapid vision, had such an absence of differences and well spoken voices. Why the hell would Weed Atman drive miles to meet an unknown dentist with no results, and then go back?  How do Weed and Frenesi frequently come and go with no suspicion from Rex, from 24 fps, and why isnt he simply seized while away from the campus ?
>
> These doings at College of the surf are the crux of Pynchon’s fable and  instead of being weird and troubling but psychologically and historically credible, instead of standing in for something we are willing to  believe, it is loose and disjointed like something told by someone who has just smoked way to much hashish to an audience equally stoned and credulous.  Instead it is , in the novel, being told to the smart, discrimating Prairie Wheeler,  and as a thanatoid to the equally astute Takeshi and his hardboiled assistant. In short the setup for the crucial showdown is rich , complex and feels real on many levels, but the scene of the showdown and the characters who act out the showdown dissolve into incoherence and ill defined cartoons, a hippie Eve, a porn star mathemetician who never seems to think or fit his role.
>
> OK, different than others critiques I have read, but I feel like it’s pretty valid. Can anyone see my points, even if you disagree?   More to come.
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