Pynchon and Fascism

[Corbeau Castrum]

This recent discussion got me curious about how dear TP uses the terms fascism and fascist in his writing. (I've tried to find every reference, and as a consequence, this is a very long email, so I wanted to keep it in a separate thread.)

In general, Pynchon uses fascism to describe both historical fascists (Italians and Germans) and a certain political attitude towards the world (the pleasure of seizing and capturing). The reference to fascism for describing Americans feds (e.g. Brock Vond) is especially prevalent among self-consciously leftwing characters (e.g. Zoyd in Vineland, March in Bleeding Edge). I would privilege Vineland as having the most developed discussion of fascism beyond mere representation of the Nazis themselves; Shadow Ticket naturally has the most immediate relevance to us. Enjoy!

Pynchon’s references to fascism

V. (1963)

“‘You’re from Munich,’ Weissmann established. ‘Ever been around the Schwabing quarter?’ On occasion.

‘The Brennessel cabaret?’ Never. ‘Ever heard of D’Annunzio?’ Then: Mussolini? Fiume? Italia irredenta?

Fascisti? National Socialist German Workers' Party? Adolf Hitler? Kautsky's Independents?

‘So many capital letters,’ Mondaugen protested.

‘From Munich, and never heard of Hitler,’ said Weissmann, as if ‘Hitler’ were the name of an avant-garde play. ‘What the hell's wrong with young people.’”

“Ruby fiddled with the catches on her overnight bag. ‘Your wife wouldn't like that too much. Why don’t McClintic and I just go up in the Triumph. You shouldn't go to that trouble.’

‘My wife,’ angry all at once, ‘is a fucking Fascist, I think you should know that.’ – Rooney Winsome referring his wife

“‘Look,’ he grabbed a pencil. ‘It is no time of year to go to Cuba. Hotter than Nueva York, no doubt, off season. But for all his Fascist tendencies, Battista has one golden virtue: abortion he maintains is legal. Which means you get an M.D. who knows what he's about, not some fumbling amateur. It’s clean, it’s safe, it’s legal, above all, it’s cheap.”

“Melvin was holding forth on his guitar, in an improvised folk song, about how humanitarian a cove his roommate Slab was; crediting him with being (a) a neo-Wobbly and reincarnation of Joe Hill, (b) the world's leading pacifist, (c) a rebel with taproots in the American Tradition, (d) in militant opposition to Fascism, private capital, the Republican administration and Westbrook Pegler.”

“[…] an unemployed musicologist named Petard who had dedicated his life to finding the lost Vivaldi Kazoo Concerto, first brought to his attention by one Squasimodeo, formerly a civil servant under Mussolini and now lying drunk under the piano, who had heard not only of its theft from a monastery by certain Fascist music-lovers but also about twenty bars from the slow movement, which Petard would from time to time wander round the party blowing on a plastic kazoo […]”

The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)

No specific use of the term fascist/fascism, but there is one Oedpia’s therapist Dr. Hilarius:

“Yes, you hate me. But didn’t I try to atone? If I’d been a real Nazi I’d have chosen Jung, nicht wahr? But I chose Freud instead, the Jew. Freud’s vision of the world had no Buchenwalds in it. Buchenwald, according to Freud, once the light was let in, would become a soccer field, fat children would learn flower-arranging and solfeggio in the strangling rooms.”

Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)

“‘Our Mr. Eventyr,’ motioning at the medium who’s across the room chatting with young Gavin Trefoil, ‘could be fallen upon at any moment—pouring in the windows, hauling dangerous tough Eventyr away to the Scrubs on pretending-to-exercise-or-use-a-kind-of-conjuration-to-cause-the-spirits-of-deceased-persons-to-be-present-in-fact-at-the-place-where-he-then-was-and-that-those-spirits-were-communicating-with-living-persons-then-and-there-present my God what imbecile Fascist rot. . .” (34). – Roger Mexico speaking

“‘For pity’s sake, is this ethical?’ raising an arm then toward the exit into the ward, almost a Fascist salute” (49). – Kevin Spectro disagreeing with Pointsman

“[…] as the train puffs by, never a clear sense of nationality anywhere, nor even of belligerent sides, only the War, a single damaged landscape, in which ‘neutral Switzerland’ is a rather

stuffy convention, observed but with as much sarcasm as ‘liberated France’ or ‘totalitarian Germany,’ ‘Fascist Spain,’ and others. . . .” (260).

“Sure, what about—well, that Spain? no wait, they’re Fascists” (269).

“He appears to be weeping silently, bending, a failed angel, over all these second-rate Alps, over all the night skiers far below, out on the slopes, crisscrossing industriously, purifying and perfecting their Fascist ideal of Action, Action, Action, once his own shining reason for being” (270).

“Ev’ry little Nazi’s shootin’ pool or playin’ potsy/On the Mittel-werk Ex-press!/All the funny Fascists just a-twirlin’ their mustaches” (315).

“OH . . . thur’s . . . /Nazis in the woodwork,/Fascists in the walls,/Little Japs with bucktooth grins/A-gonna grab yew bah th’ balls” (319).

“Down the worn paths, under the accustomed trees, past the German goldfish pool that reminded him of home, across the golf links, the day’s last white-mustached men struggling up out of traps and hazards, their caddies standing at allegorical attention in the glow of the sunset, the bundled clubs in Fascist silhouette. . . .” (485). – Morituri finding Margherita killing Jewish children

“[…] he will lunge after her without thinking much, slip himself as she vanishes under the chalky lifelines and gone, stagger trying to get back but be hit too soon in the kidneys and be flipped that easy over the side and it’s adios to the Anubis and all its screaming Fascist cargo, already no more ship, not even black sky as the rain drives down his falling eyes now in quick needlestrokes, and he hits, without a call for help, just a meek tearful oh fuck, tears that will add nothing to the whipped white desolation that passes for the Oder Half tonight. . . .” (500) – Slothrop going after Bianca

“What are you doing in a Fascist uniform like that?” (521) – Närrisch speaking to Slothrop

“[…] Chiclitz screaming out the window admonitions like ‘Fuck not with the Kid, lest instead of fucker thou become fuckee,’ which takes a while and draws only a few bewildered Fascist salutes from old ladies and little children at the roadside” (569).

“She missed the International Brigades, shut away up in her cold green mountains and fighting hit-and-run long after the Fascists had occupied all the north—missed the flowers, children, kisses, and many tongues of Barcelona, of Valencia where she’s never been, Valencia, this evening’s home. . . . Ya salimos de Espana. ... Pa’ luchar en otros ffentes, ay, Manuela, ay, Manuela. . . .” (616). – free-indirect discourse of the prostitute Manuela

“Walking now in among miles-down-the-sky shelves and food-mountains or food-cities of Iceboxland (but look out, it can get pretty Fascist in here, behind the candy-colored sweet stuff is thermodynamic elitism at its clearest—bulbs can be replaced with candles and the radios fall silent, but the Grid’s big function in this System is iceboxery: freezing back the tumultuous cycles of the day to preserve this odorless small world, this cube of changelessness)” (691).

This is not the word fascism, but I do like Pynchon’s discussion of Laszlo Jamf’s “National Socialist chemistry,” which captures something of what Pynchon means by fascism: “that something so mutable, so soft, as a sharing of electrons by atoms of carbon should lie at the core of life, his life, struck Jamf as a cosmic humiliation. Sharing? How much stronger,

how everlasting was the ionic bond—where electrons are not shared, but captured. Seized! and held! polarized plus and minus, these atoms, no ambiguities . . . how he came to love that clarity: how stable it was, such mineral stubbornness!” (587).

Slow Learner introduction (1984)

“Modern readers will be, at least, put off by an unacceptable level of racist, sexist and proto-Fascist talk throughout this story. I wish I could say that this is only Pig Bodine's voice, but, sad to say, it was also my own at the time” (11).

Vineland (1990)

“‘Well then, sir,’ replied the NBA-sized violence enthusiast who might or might not be fucking his daughter, ‘I must’ve meant “lunch meat” only in terms of our joint strange fate as mortal sandwich, equally exposed to the jaws of destiny, and from that perspective what's it matter, rilly, that you don't care for the musical statements of Septic Tank or Fascist Toejam?’ jiveassing so obvious that Zoyd had no choice but to thaw” (18). – Isaiah 2:4 speaking to Zoyd.

“‘Me either,’ Zoyd muttered. ‘You’re going to a full-scale Ital-

ian wedding and do what? “Fascist Toejam’ s Greatest Hits”?’” (21).

“She wa’n’ spoze to Hector, that was never part of the deal. I wondered how long it was gonna take—twelve, thirteen years, not bad, you mind if I call the Guinness Book Hot Line with this, it has to be a world record for fascist regimes keepin’ their word” (28). – Zoyd speaking to Hector

“Somebody put a Fascist Toejam cassette, 300 watts of sonic apocalypse, on to the van stereo, Isaiah gallantly handed Prairie up into the lurid fuchsia padding of this rolling orgy room, where she became indistinct among an unreadable pattern of Vomitones and their girlfriends, and quickly, in an arc unexpectedly graceful, they had all turned outward, tached up, engaged, and like a time machine departing for the future, forever too soon for Zoyd, boomed away up the thin, cloudpressed lane” (55).

“OK then, how about Brock Vond, who we both know for what he is, exactly the kind of criminal fascist you’ve been takin’ honest shots at all your life—are you gonna be loyal to somebodylike that?” (58). – Zoyd speaking to Sasha

“‘See that credit there?’ getting right up beside the screen to zero in on the offending line, ‘That fascist fuck,’ tapping the glass over the name fiercely, ‘owes me two years of work, you could’ve gone to college on what that SOB will always owe me.’” (82). – quotes Frenesi overheard from her parents

“It was a strange idea even coming from Sasha, but since her very first Rose Parade up till the present she’d felt in herself a fatality, a helpless turn toward images of authority, especially uniformed men, whether they were athletes live or on the Tube, actors in movies of war through the ages, or maître d’s in restaurants, not to mention waiters and busboys, and she further believed that it could be passed on, as if some Cosmic Fascist had spliced in a DNA sequence requiring this form of seduction and initiation into the dark joys of social control” (83). – Sasha reflecting on her uniform fetish, which she fears she passed down to Frenesi

“We will be architects of a just Hell for the fascist pig. Death to everything that oinks!"—which for many was going too far, including Mirage, on her feet to insist that pigs are really groovy, in fact far groovier than any humans their name ever gets applied to” (197). – Thanks to John Krafft for finding this quote.

“In the equipment van, among quartz lamps and PARbulbs, color-temperature meters, blue filters, cable of different gauges, lamp stands, and ladders, were also grid-access devices,

designed and taught her by Hub Gates, customized as occasion demanded by his daughter, ‘the young gaffer,’ as he liked to call her, intended for draining off whenever possible the lifeblood of the fascist monster, Central Power itself, merciless as a tornado or a bomb yet somehow, as she had begun to discover in dreams of that period, personally aware, possessing life and will” (201-2). – description of 24fps equipment

“Yet if there was anything left to believe, she must have in the power even of that weightless, daylit commodity of the sixties to redeem even Brock, amiably, stupidly brutal, fascist Brock” (217).

“Weed betrayed that, and it was cowardly because it was easy, ‘cause he knew we can’t shut anybody out, down the end of that road is fuckin’ fascism, so we take ‘em all, the hypocrites and double agents and summertime outlaws and all that fringe residue nobody else’ll touch” (235). – political discussion for PR3

“Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn't it — dismantle the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and around the world, flee into the past, can't

you feel it, all the dangerous childish stupidity—'I don’t like the way it came out, I want it to be my way.’ If the President can act like that, why not Brock?” (265). – Ditzah speaking to DL and Prairie about Brock

“Officially he was up to have a look at the physical plant and inspect the population of his Political Re-Education Program, or PREP, Brock’s own baby, his gamble on a career coup, his thin-ice special, just about to be put in as a rider to what would be the Crime Control Act of 1970 by a not-so-neo fascist congressman from Trasero County, a friend of friends in

returning whose several kindnesses this solon had more than once found himself creeping within squinting range of the chain-link perimeters of Allenwood, Pa.” (268) – Although Trasero County is fictional, the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 was sponsored by Democrat John L. McClellan (Arkansas segregationist who opposed Eisenhower sending federal troops in to Central Rock in 1957) and signed into law by Richard Nixon

“With his own private horrors further unfolded into an ideology of the mortal and uncontinued self, Brock came to visit, and strangely to comfort, in the half-lit hallways of the night, leaning darkly in above her like any of the sleek raptors that decorate fascist architecture” (286-7). – Frenesi and Brock

“Zoyd looked miserable enough about it for Sasha to lean, sock him in a precise, friendly way on the shoulder, and say, ‘All that fascist prick wants is to keep Frenesi from seeing her child again’” (304-5). – Speaking about Brock

“About the only thing’ll get a fascist through’s his charm. The newsfolks love it” (306). – Sasha speaking to Zoyd about Brock

“And other grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. One by one, as other voices joined in, the names

began—some shouted, some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of contention, stomach distress, and insomnia—Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide remotenesses of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath” (371-2).

Neither Mason & Dixon (1997) nor Against The Day(2006) use fascist or fascism, consistent with their historical settings

Inherent Vice (2009)

“That evening over at Penny’s place, Doc fell asleep on her couch in front of the day’s sports highlights, and when he woke, sometime well after dark, a face, which turned out to be Nixon’s, was on the tube going, ‘There are always the whiners and complainers who’ll say, this is fascism. Well, fellow Americans, if it’s Fascism for Freedom? I . . . can . . . dig it!” (120).

“He’s been out there sold-ierin for a/Fascist state, so don't ex-/Pect too much fun on the

Very first date, he’ll be/Missin the life, he’ll be/Missin the food, he’ll be/Goin around in this pe-culi-ar mood, wond’rin/Howdid he get back here in the World/With the freaked-out hippies and the/Dopesmokin girls, and it’s a” (198). – song by Spotted Dick, which was also turned into a real song by Visit on their album Now Everybody—

“Once Doc would have said, ‘Well, that’s that, can I go now?’ But with this new fascist model Bigfoot, the one he’d recently found out maybe he couldn’t trust after all, the old style of needling somehow wasn’t as much fun anymore” (210).

“He’s been working as a snitch for the LAPD, and I also saw him on the tube at some Fascism for Freedom rally, pretending to scream at Nixon, working undercover for this outfit called Vigilant California?” (308). – Doc speaking to Shasta about Coy

Bleeding Edge (2014)

“The fucking fascists who call the shots haven’t stopped needing races to hate each other, it’s how they keep wages down, and rents high, and all the power over on the East Side, and everything ugly and brain-dead just the way they like it.” – March speaking to Maxine

“As if it was us who created Bush and his gang, Cheney and Rove and Rumsfeld and Feith and the rest of them—we who called down the sacred lightning of ‘democracy,’ and then the fascist majority on the Supreme Court threw the switches, and Bush rose from the slab and began his rampage.” – March’s weblog

“For whose eyes would stuff like this be intended? For Maxine’s Only? who would benefit from knowing that twenty years ago Windust was still capable of a good deed, in saving his then-wife Xiomara from the fascist murderers he was technically working for?” – Windust free-indirect

Shadow Ticket (2025)

“‘Der Führer,’ gently, ‘is der future, Hicks. Just the other day the Journal calls him “that intelligent young German Fascist.”’” – Uncle Lefty speaking to Hicks

“…as the P.I. field in general begins to shift from skips and small-time offenses into more of an espionage racket, along with that comes the need for a snappier getup, European Fascist uniforms at the moment, as you may have noticed from the newsreels, being widely admired and commented on.” – Boynt speaking to Hicks

“‘It’s a Fascist dictatorship, Professore.’‘Don’t tell them around Palermo. What makes you private dicks any different?’ ‘Oh, swell, P.I.s are Fascists now?’” – Hicks speaking to Kelly

“It’s a strange time we’re in just now,” Alf reflects, “one of those queer little passageways behind the scenery, where popes make arrangements with Fascists and the needs of cold capitalist reality and those of adjoining ghost worlds come into rude contact…many have been quick to blame it on the War, on the insupportable weight of so many dead, so many wrongs still unresolved.”

“Sometimes all Hicks wants is to be back in Milwaukee, restored to normal life, to a country not yet gone Fascist, a place of clarity and safety, still snoozy and safe, brat smoke from a lunch wagon grill, some kid practicing accordion through an open window, first snow coming into town off the prairie, barrooms where the smell of beer is generations deep, women in round little hats.”

“Hungaro-Croatian terrorist training camp, located right on the borderline, not, like the notorious Jankapuszta, aimed at Yugoslavia in particular so much as flexibly all-purpose Fascist, quivering in readiness to be deployed anywhere…specializing in lightning putsches local and continent-wide, chaste as any of nature’s killer species, briefly innocent as Fascism in its “springtime of beauty,” as the old anthem goes, before it descended into paperwork and brutality…

Fascist adventurers have journeyed here from all over, Austrians sporting blue cornflowers and black grouse feathers, secret police, anti-Red goon squads, revolutionary cells, convicts escaped from internal exile and not sure where they are right now or what language they’re supposed to be speaking, colonial stooges in civvies in from as far afield as Indo-China and South America, irredentist aristos from the old Hungarian kingdom adrift in nostalgia, Polish freelancers working on spec for all of the above.”

“‘History rolls on,’ Storm Leader Dubendorff, apparently in charge of the entertainment around here, greets the band, “toward our Fascist future, immense and stately, we here being only the squalls and tornadoes breaking out at her edges […]’”

“Somewhere close by, an ordinarily friendly cruce game has unexpectedly flared into violence when a visiting Fascist, maybe only unfamiliar with the ornately detailed Hungarian deck, fails to follow suit.”

“There’s also the church, the military, the old dictator Primo de Rivera, his son who’s putting together his own phalanx of Fascists. Hatred between the Right and the Left gets worse every day, Asturias is ready to explode. Soon as I can get hold of a tommy gun I’m just going out before breakfast and start shooting Fascists.” – Glow speaking to Daphne

“Once a major port of embarkation for the New World, bright and bustling, Fiume now is a tattered ghost city with a sordid history of secret treaties and sellouts, edging its way through what the Fascist Italian regime calls Year Ten, continuing to collapse in on itself, unlikely to be redeemed, barricaded and wire-fenced, corroded, sentry-boxed, moonlit some nights brighter than what flickering neon remains…

Some blame Fascist Italy, which absorbed it. Others point out that any attempt to go up against the liberal bourgeois order is destined to fail. Rollicking youth grow old, the middle-class condition goes on forever. So forth.”

“[…] a villa just across the border from the new Yugoslavian entity, in fact having no agreed-upon location unless “Currently in Dispute” is your idea of a postal address, at times partly situated in Serbo-Croat-Slovene territory, and part in Fascist Italy…”

“Fascist daredevil aviators are playing poker with Yangtze Patrol veterans who believe all that airplanes are good for is to be shot down.”

“You might consider us an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time, forever on the move, a patch of Fiume as it once was, immune to time, surviving all these years in the deep refuge of the sea…” – Ernst Hauffnitz speaking to Hicks

“Bankers, capitalists, club-fellows, Fascists locally and abroad ignore Bruno’s pleas, offer no aid or comfort, fail to return ship-to-shore phone calls, often too busy thrashing desperately themselves against the relentless vortex of a sinking world order, others relying on their faith in the realities of blood and soil, which never go away, to save them.”

“Chazz has become something of an international adventurer, having at the moment just signed on to a scheme hatched and run by U.S. ruling-class elements who are betting that the island of Sicily will be a strategic factor in the next war, and that therefore a local anti-Fascist guerrilla force, trained, armed, and ready to roll, might someday prove helpful.

‘They hate Mussolini, who’s been trying to bring the island under Fascist control—sorry, Duce, no sale—which has not been lost on my principals.’” – Chazz speaking to Hicks; as far as I’ve seen, this is the only time anti-Fascist is named explicitly in Pynchon’s œuvre