At the end of the first chapter of
Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49, the heroine Oedipa Maas is reminded of a trip
to Mexico with her former and now late lover Pierce Inverarity.
In Mexico City they
somehow wandered into an exhibition of paintings by the beautiful Spanish exile Remidios
Varo: in the central painting of a triptych, titled "Bordando el Manto
Terreste", were a number of frail girls with heart-shaped faces, huge eyes, spun-gold
hair, prisoners in the top room of a circular tower, embroidering a kind of tapestry which
spilled out the slit windows and into a void, seeking hopelessly to fill the void: for all
the other buildings and creatures, all the waves, ships and forests of the earth were
contained in this tapestry, and the tapestry was the world. (Pynchon 1967, 10)
If you imagine a tapestry, spreading out
from a single point, you will get something approaching the shape of a wavy V, the letter
which is of crucial importance in the novels of Thomas Pynchon. If Mexico City is chosen
as the starting point of this image, the shape of the wavy V may come to resemble the
North American continent – and it may be useful to keep in mind that it was Central
America where the first concepts of the New World were formed.
And if you finally travel along the
branching lines of the V up to 40° of latitude, you will come to Vineland: i.e. the
actually existing town of Vineland, New Jersey, in the East and the fictional city and
county of Vineland in the West.
When Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland was
published in 1990, the initial V. served to some extent as a trademark of the obscure
author, and after 17 years of silence since Gravity's Rainbow expectations were
running high. But many of the reviewers were rather disappointed at first (cf. Keesey
1990; Hawthorne 1992, 77).
The title suggested some historical depth, a concern
with the origin of America, and possibly an evocation of another American dream, the
mythological 'Vinland the Good', which never had to face the reality of history and thus
could remain in a prelapsarian state. Yet, there is less historical interest in the actual
book than in any of Pynchon's previous novels. The text hardly ever leaves the time-frame
experienced by its readers, i.e. the few decades since the 60s; only occasionally are
there some brief reminiscences about the strikes and labour movements of the 30s or the
anticommunist witch hunt of the 50s. And the only mythology mentioned in the text is the
lore of the Yuroks, the native Americans of the Vineland area.
Still, some attempts were made to link the
fictional Vineland of the novel with the Vinland of the Vikings:
As a distant,
romanticized land, Vinland connoted refuge, a haven after the harrowing crossing of the
Atlantic. Pynchon's Vineland is also a refuge where fantasy, or at least the ignoring of
reality, can shape a girl's education, keeping her from knowing the secrets of her mother,
but it is a refuge surrounded and finally invaded by reality. Vinland became identified
with Thule, the White Island or Blessed Islands of Western mythology; likewise, Vineland
is associated with Tsorrek because it stands at the mouth of the river that, according to
Yurok geography, flows from the land of the living to the land of the dead. (Hawthorne,
77)
I will later come back to the mythical
river of the dead, but for the moment I would like to suggest that this kind of analogy is
rather forced – the 'Blessed Islands' do not really resemble the grim image of
Tsorrek.
Another critic wrote:
... Vineland
sets its dreary depiction of contemporary reality against former utopian dreams of what
America might one day become. Although the title refers to the novel's setting in the
fictional (but realistic) town of Vineland, California, it also evokes the name given
America by the Vikings, a name that conveys a sense of abundance and promise. The New
World as a whole originally functioned in the European psyche as a locus of hopeful
idealism. [...] But the cruelty with which ... [the] conquistadors subdued the native
population of Mexico anticipates Pynchon's suggestion in Vineland that the American
dream has become a nightmare. (Booker 1992, 7)
The sudden shift from Leif Erikson's
idealized Vinland to the Spanish conquest in the quotation above blends two images of the
New World which are not so easily reconciled. After all, even in the earliest Spanish
accounts of America the utopian dream was frequently balanced by its opposite, the
dystopian nightmare – the arcadian garden was also supposed to be inhabited by a
multitude of monsters and man-eating savages. I also doubt that Pynchon suggests that the
American dream has become a nightmare, all his novels and especially his latest book Mason
and Dixon indicate that history has lately been 'a nightmare from which he is trying
to awake'.
But the setting of the novel in the year
1984 certainly does suggest a dystopian view of contemporary America and thus the Vineland
region, a dwelling place of marihuana farmers, old hippies, and large sections of the
counter culture, may very well indicate the other America, which is now under siege, the
land of myth and eternal childhood. But Pynchon's novel is far too ambiguous to offer us a
simplistic alternative of a better world, even if this world is eventually doomed to fail
and to succumb to the evil forces of Reaganite persecution. His Vineland is a complex web
of intertextual references and hidden allusions, and I want to suggest that one of the
most important texts in this context is John Barth's novel The End of the Road
which is partly set in Vineland, New Jersey - Barth's title would, of course, be a very
suitable subtitle for all of Pynchon's novels.
Vineland, New Jersey, was, by the way, the
site of a utopian community in the 19th century, based on strictly teetotal regulations.
The fact that Pynchon's Vineland is rather the last refuge for dope heads and the
grass-growing segment of American agriculture may tie in with concepts of complementarity
in his earlier novels.(2) And maybe the oversized
grapes of the mythical Vinland were simply translated into modern modes of intoxication.
The End of the Road, published in
1958, explores the human condition in terms of freedom, choice, and motivation. I suppose
that it will not be necessary to outline the plot of the novel; for the purpose at hand a
brief summary of the basic situation will suffice. At the chronological beginning of the
novel, the hero, Jacob Horner, does not sit in the corner as in the well-known nursery
rhyme, but on a bench at Pennsylvania Railway Station in Baltimore, and he is completely
paralysed - not because of some kind of bodily handicap or ailment, but because he simply
cannot find any reason to move. Having asked at the ticket window for possible
destinations he might reach with his money, he takes a seat to make up his mind.
And it was
there that I simply ran out of motives, as a car runs out of gas. There was no reason to
go to Cincinnati, Ohio. There was no reason to go to Crestline, Ohio. Or Dayton, Ohio; or
Lima, Ohio. There was no reason, either, to go back to the apartment hotel, or for that
matter to go anywhere. There was no reason to do anything. My eyes, as Winckelmann said
inaccurately of the eyes of the Greek statues, were sightless, gazing on eternity, fixed
on ultimacy, and when that is the case there is no reason to do anything – even to
change the focus of one's eyes
.
(Barth 1988; hereafter quoted as ER).
The plurality of possibilities has led to
an impasse, because the alternatives offered carry no intrinsic value. If everything is
ultimately the same, there is no basis and no reason for choice. Jacob Horner remains in
the grip of paralysis, like Buridan's ass locked in his state of indecision, until next
day he is observed by an obscure, nameless black doctor who specializes in cases of
psychological paralysis and takes him to a remobilization farm. The farm is situated in
Vineland, New Jersey.
This choice of location in a novel of
mainly fictitious places may be taken as an indication that America and the American dream
are at stake and that the therapies offered or rather prescribed bear some significance
for the American condition.(3)
The most important and striking feature of
all the quite unusual therapies mentioned is that they do not even try to touch upon the
causes of psychological paralysis, all they deal with are the symptoms of a state of mind
which is more or less taken for granted. Among the therapies offered there are
Agapotherapy or Devotional Therapy, Sexual Therapy, Conversational Therapy, Virtue and
Vice Therapy, Philosophical Therapy, Theotherapy and Atheotherapy, all of which are
basically methods by which one may choose between different modes of action without the
necessity of an individual evaluation of the possibilities at hand.
The Doctor states that "Choosing is
existence" (ER 77), and in this claim we may detect a faint echo of the credo
of democracy, a celebration of the ultimate achievement of freedom in the proverbial land
of unlimited possibilities, but the principle of choice is re-qualified as an absurd
ritual, vital but meaningless:
[D]on't let
yourself get stuck between alternatives, or you're lost... If the alternatives are side by
side, choose the one on the left; if they are consecutive in time, choose the earlier. If
neither of these applies choose the alternative whose name begins with the earlier letter
of the alphabet. These are the principles of Sinistrality, Antecedence, and Alphabetical
Priority – there are others, and they are arbitrary, but useful. (ER 80f.)
The French equivalent of Jacob Horner, the
hero of René Clair's La Princess de Chine, organizes his life on the basis of
similar modes of selection in an extensive game on probability. In John Barth's novel, the
ability to choose remains a sine qua non of existence even after the evaluation of
alternatives has long lost its relevance.
Jacob Horner's paralysis is the result of
an ultimate lack of ego, he is simply a person without a personality. His emblem is a
small statue of Laokoön, immobilized, the mute mouth opened in a silent scream. The
doctor's solution to Horner's problem is Mythotherapy, the willful selection of a
role-model as the prototype for one's own life and for every process of decision-making.
Mythotherapy is
based on two assumptions: that human existence precedes human essence, if either of the
two terms really signifies anything; and that a man is free not only to choose his own
essence but to change it at will. Those are both good existentialist premises, and whether
they're true or false is of no concern to us - they're useful in your case. (ER
82, italics in the original)
The philosophical principle 'Know thyself'
is thus undermined by the realization that there is no self to be known, that there are
only multitudes of masks to conceal the essential emptiness. The American ideal of the
self-made man takes an almost Lacanian twist, when the "self" is
"made" by prefabricated roles, when the life story precedes the life it will
narrate. It is made quite clear that Mythotherapy is not simply the cure for Jacob's state
of mind but the general mode of human existence, that paralysis is rather the result of
not being able to participate in Mythotherapy any longer. In consequence, all the
characters of the novel are occasionally observed in the process of donning and doffing
their masks. In fact, it seems as if John Barth in his novel had anticipated Foucault's
diagnosis of the selves as the difference of masks (cf. Foucault 1974, 131).
Thus the question for motivation leads to
an infinite regress, as every action can be traced back to an earlier choice of the role
to which the function of decision-making was assigned. When Jacob Horner commits adultery
with his only friend's wife, the attempt to analyze this act, to attribute motive to a
deed done, will lead to catastrophe. As neither of the characters in question is able to
account for any intentions which motivated the act or to define the infinitesimally small
change in atmosphere which ultimately led to the considerable result, the only mode of
investigation seems to consist in a forced and increasingly reluctant repetition, which
leads to pregnancy, which leads to abortion, which leads to death. The concept that each
life is based on a story and that the story precedes life must take into account that each
story ends with the final period, that human life follows the law of diminishing
possibilities. (It might be possible to take the development of the plot as a kind of
analogy to the butterfly effect of chaos theory, i.e. a minor shift in initial conditions
leads to major effects, but then, novelists knew about this long before scientists began
to investigate the phenomenon.)
The ill-fated abortion is performed by the
nameless doctor in Vineland. It is preceded by a kind of Faustian pact in order to gain
the doctor's agreement, but in accordance with the basic lack of human essence proclaimed
throughout the novel, Jacob Horner does not have to trade his dubitable soul but his
future life - he agrees to become the property of the doctor, to follow him as a living
case study when the farm is moved to a new location - the remobilization farm turns out to
be the most mobile element in the novel. On the last page Jacob Horner is taking a taxi to
the railway station to meet the doctor. Beginning and end are reversed in the image of the
railway station, i.e. the starting point of endlessly bifurcating paths but at the same
time the final destination of all those paths. This image will return in the mythology of
the other Vineland on the west coast.
But in a sense, the story of Jacob Horner
begins and ends in Vineland at the remobilization farm, where initially unlimited, though
meaningless possibilities are offered, only they lead back to the same place and to the
loss of any choice. The American dream of liberty, of mobility, of the eternal frontier,
has been replaced by arbitrariness, chance, and mindless motion, and ultimately by
paralysis and death, the last word of the novel being "Terminal" - I do not
think it will be necessary to elaborate on the double meaning.
In Pynchon's Vineland some of the
elements of The End of the Road are re-investigated. Again, I do not think that it
will be necessary to give an outline of the plot; as a matter of fact, this would be quite
impossible, as the novels of Thomas Pynchon do not yield to any kind of summary. Let it
suffice that the novel is based on the quest of a young girl, Prairie Wheeler, for her
mother, Frenesi, who in the 60s had originally been a member of a radical film crew but
crossed the lines and for some time became the lover and instrument of the evil principle
of the novel, the DA Brock Vond. As in The End of the Road, the novel begins and
ends in Vineland, but it is Vineland, California, and 30 years have passed.
Again, Vineland marks an end of the road,
in a sense one might say that Vineland is the last frontier of an expanding and colonizing
America.
Someday this would
be all part of a Eureka – Crescent City – Vineland megalopolis, but for now the
primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what
early visitors in Spanish and Russian ships had seen. Along with noting the size and
fierceness of the salmon, the fogbound treachery of the coast, the fishing villages of the
Yurok and Tolowa people, log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to
write down, more than once, the sense they had of some invisible boundary, met when
approaching from the sea ... (Pynchon 1990, 317; hereafter quoted as Vl)
This almost mythical land has become the
last refuge for the remains of the American counter culture of the 60s, eternal hippies as
well as labour movement activists, but it is under siege from the lumber industry on the
one hand and from CAMP, i.e. the Campaign Against Marihuana Production, on the other hand.
In consideration of Pynchon's rather obvious bias for the failed revolution of the 60s and
the identification of evil with the Reagan administration and especially every kind of law
enforcement, this could lead to the simple understanding that Vineland resembles Vinland
the Good, that good and evil are easily distinguished in the novel and in politics in
general, and that mind-expanding drugs may offer a new vision of the American dream. As a
matter of fact, one of the leaders of the 60s in the novel, later to be assassinated, is
called Weed Atman, which might be translated into 'marihuana smoke'. But things are not so
easy in Pynchon's novels.
If possible, the psychological involvement
with Mythotherapy has taken leaps since The End of the Road. But while the doctor's
prescriptions were chiefly based on the classical role-models of Western tradition or even
on the narrative functions as described by structuralist patterns, we now encounter
distinct voices and gestures taken directly from the ever present television, the
capitalized Tube. In Orwell's 1984 the telescreen serves as the ubiquitous
instrument of control because it can monitor each and every move, in Vineland's
America of 1984 this has proven to be quite unnecessary because each and every move is
motivated by the images and characters observed on the screen. The vision of the American
dream has been replaced by television, and the question of good and evil is blurred by the
fact that every story needs its villain, no matter whether the villain is the outlaw or
the cop. When Prairie's father is confronted by an old time acquaintance from the police
who is still after him, the conversation turns into a fast game of impersonations with the
law enforcement officer humming the tune from "Meet the Flintstones" and
alternately imitating Clint Eastwood and Skipper from Gilligan's Island.
As one result of this impact of the media,
the generation gap tends to close. The world of Vineland is marked by a culture of
reruns, and thus also by a ritualized and quite literal déjà vu, as each
childhood is largely structured by the tubal input which remains constantly retrievable
ever after. Children and adults are thus shaped by the same experience, in which the past
and the present are to some extent fused - the endless repetition creates a kind of
timelessness. (As a matter of fact, a childhood which is extended into adult life is one
of the significant features in the culture of the Yuroks, the native Americans of the
Vineland region (cf. Becke & Vanderbeke 1992, 63-76) – and it might be of
interest here, that one of the standard texts on Childhood in America contains a
chapter on the Yuroks and was written by Erik Erikson"(4) - the surname should ring a bell in the context of Vineland.)
Pynchon's Vineland features an
equivalent to the clinic in The End of the Road, but it is no longer concerned with
those who are unable to participate in Mythotherapy, it rather deals with patients who
have developed some televisionary addiction, it is a "dryin'-out place for
Tubefreeks" (Vl 33). The name of this clinic is one of Pynchon's typical
acronyms: the abbreviation of the 'National Endowment for Video Education and
Rehabilitation' spells NEVER, and like the Neverland of Peter Pan or Michael Jackson it is
a place for those who are unwilling or unable to grow up.
But it is not only the personal of Vineland
that is obsessed with the new media, the text itself occasionally reads like a complicated
version of Trivial Pursuit's silver screen edition. The novel contains about 300 names,
and, disregarding the characters of the novel, the by far largest group of them consists
of real or fictional characters associated with the new media. As a result, the reading
process occasionally turns into an extended excursion into pop culture, but there is a
catch. Once you have achieved a complete understanding of all the allusions, you yourself
will have turned into a potential patient of the rehabilitation centre for addicts of
tubal abuse.
And finally reality itself seems to have
been infused with the fantasies of the screen. All of Pynchon's novels call for a heavy
dose of willing suspension of disbelief, and, quite regularly, the most unbelievable
elements are actually taken from life. But here the fantastic element is almost completely
an extension of television's virtual reality into the world of Vineland. The Thanatoids, a
group of reproachful revenants who try to obtain recompense for wrongs done to them while
alive, are, for example, quite obviously descendants of George A. Romero's living dead,
and when a Japanese Research and Development laboratory is flattened by a foot sized
20,000, we simply know that it was an act of God or Godzilla. The world is constantly
being told and retold on the screen, until the narrative claims priority over the world
itself. In terms of the image of the girls who weave the world in TCoL49, in Vineland
the tapestry of the world has turned into video tape.
The ritualized cultural experience based on
repetition, the dependence on pre-fashioned role-models in any attempt to cope with an
increasingly complex world and especially the interaction of reality with the virtual
reality of a prevailing narrative mode which is distinctly illiterate mark a cultural
situation which bears some resemblance to mythical ways of worldmaking. America has to
some extent returned to its origins.
This world is ruled by the members of a
remote power-elite - Brock Vond calls them the "Real Ones" (Vl 276) just
as H. P. Lovecraft refers to the 'Great Old Ones' or the 'Ancient Ones'. Their will is
carried out by the computer, an instrument of control which has turned into a symbol of
arbitrariness, of incomprehensible but unquestionable processes of decision-making, and
into a metaphor for a cruel and despotic God. When Prairie's mother Frenesi and her
husband are quite suddenly dropped from the government's pay-list and their bank-accounts
are canceled, she starts to hum to a sort of standard gospel tune:
We are digits in
God's computer (...) and the only thing we're good for, to be dead or to be living, is the
only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for, in our world of toil and blood, it
all lies beneath the notice of the hacker we call God. (Vl 91)
The computer has assumed the role of former
mythical deities, granting or withholding the flow of modern forms of sustenance, i.e.
money, in the same way in which the local gods granted or withheld the return of the
salmon. The novel opens with an ritualized annual performance by Prairie's father: once a
year he has to jump through the closed window of a public building to prove his mental
instability and also his obedience to the powers that be, he is rewarded with a monthly
mental-disability check.
The story of Vineland follows
Campbell's well known pattern of the quest for the mythical hero's – or in this case
heroine's – origin. The time-frame is cyclical rather than linear, and both the
beginning and the end are marked by annual happenings, the beginning by Zoyd Wheeler's
autodefenestration and the end by a yearly family reunion which seems to embrace all
segments of the American counter culture. This counter culture has lost the revolutionary
momentum of the 60s, in fact, the anticipation of a better society has given way to a
nostalgic remembrance of times past; the utopian dream has taken a regressive twist.
America scorns its intellectuals, and the development of the political left seems to prove
the point. According to Pynchon's assessment of the last decades, large sections of the
former left have turned to a new irrationalism and the eclecticism of the so-called New-Age-philosophy.
The movement of the 60s, which never excelled in excessive coherence, has further
dissolved into a heterogeneous mass of solipsistic and interchangeable ideologies. In Vineland
these include the usual forms of radical vegetarianism and mysticism, but also the clinic
for karmic readjustment and the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives. But in one way or
another all segments seem to be connected with Vineland and they all turn up at the annual
reunion of a Pan-American family in the Vineland region. In the course of this reunion,
the American history is ritually retold as an endless succession of persecution and the
abuse of power:
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 remoteness 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 black fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody
wanted to turn over, because of all that lived virulent, waiting, just beneath. (Vl
371)
In John Barth's novel, Vineland offered a
cure for paralysis, but the cure did not include a return to a meaningful evaluation of
different possibilities, it was based on arbitrariness and chance. In Pynchon's Vineland
all the decisions seem to have taken a bad turn, the American history reads like a long
list of wrong roads taken. The final failure of the utopian ideals was established once
the screen dominated the scene. The diagnosis is announced by an adolescent violence
freak:
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, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just
like th' Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970 dollars – it was
way too cheap... (Vl 373)
America, the seemingly most advanced
society, has relapsed into a quasi mythical mode, and the original sin is endlessly
repeated in every instance of giving in or selling out to the agents of power – in
fact, with every use of the remote control, the term carries a very precise double meaning
in this context. The area of Vineland may be a last refuge for the other America, but it
has long succumbed to the American way of life in the age of mass media (it may be of
interest here that the name of Prairie Wheeler fuses both aspects of America: the old and
the new, the primordial and virgin American landscape and the intrusion of the railroad
or, using Leo Marx's image, the machine and the garden).
In addition, the seductive power of order
is working on the last inhabitants of the happy enclave. In Orwell's 1984 there was a
catch:
If there is hope,
wrote Winston it lies in the proles. (...) (Orwell 1972, 59)
But:
Until they become
conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become
conscious. (ibid., 60)
In Vineland's 1984 the paradox
reads: If there is hope it lies in the hippies, the anarchists and especially the
children. But until they organize they can never succeed, and once they begin to organize
they have changed sides.(5) But even more
important: behind every act of revolt there lurks the wish for a return to the equilibrium
of order(6):
Brock Vond's genius
was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not a threat to order but
unacknowledged desires for it. While the tube was proclaiming youth revolution against
parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting the story, Brock saw the deep ...
need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. (Vl
269)
All this seems to indicate the necessity of
doom, the ultimate failure of each and every hope for individuality and for the salvation
of the American dream. But Pynchon ends his novel with an unexpected twist. The mythical
landscape of the native Americans itself succeeds and overcomes the forces of evil, if
only temporarily. On the last pages, the villain is led to the land of no return, to
Tsorrek, the Yurok version of Styx, the river of the dead. The road to Tsorrek can open
anywhere, i.e. all roads finally lead to the same destination, and so many have walked
this road that it is trodden deep into the earth. The familiar image of time as a garden
of branching paths, i.e. of endless possibilities, is turned into its opposite, an image
of the irreversible processes leading to death. The question of general history is
replaced by the inevitable conclusion of life. With the death of the villain the book may
end on an unfamiliarly happy note (at least in the context of Pynchon's novels), but this
is balanced by the rather grim image of the unhappy hereafter, which, after all, seems to
be a place in Arcadia.
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