on Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

 or - Hysteresis sez the man with the plan....

 I just finished re-reading Vineland. That is the final panel, one might say, in Thomas Pynchon’s go at the Cold War world – the set consisting of  V, Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland.

Pynchon was the center of James Wood’s punchup of “hysterical realism” in the 00s, stirring up a bit of sluggish controversy in that ice . Looking back at that verbiage, what stands out, to me, was the astonishing absence of the politics  that should surely figure in the mix. Wood was writing for the New Republic in its final, Marty Peretz driven phase of shredded liberalism. The politics of its book review pages had long been clear. You would not find a word of praise for anything “communistic”, anything that leaned towards Palestine, and in general anything that was happening on the “loony left”. The politics of the writers on Wood’s black list, Pynchon, Delillo, and their supposed acolytes, like Zadie Smith, was very much in contrast with the politics of the one American writer Wood championed: Saul Bellow. This isn’t to make a judgment about the variety of political stances, it is simply to note an old Cold War theme, in which a certain formalism substitutes for politics, in keeping with the odd idea that politics is somehow suspect in art – turning it into propaganda.

The problem Pynchon poses for that old theme is that he does not seem to write, as per the Old Left,  anything resembling socialist realism. Like Saul Bellow, in fact, Pynchon seems very unintimidated by the formalist notion that the essay and fiction are to be separated under pain of aesthetic failure. In a passage from an excellent essay on Vineland by Peter Coviello,The Novel and the Secret Police,  Coviello nails the politics of the book, an outlier for the end of history 90s:

“From where we sit, though, it may be better even than this. The matter is not just that Vineland is a sweetly companionable sort of book, heartsick and humane. I mean rather that it is hard, here in the somehow-not-yet-done-with-us summer of 2020, to avoid feeling that it is also unnervingly prescient, and that it is so not least in how it stitches into coherence scenes of street-fighting militancy, brutal state reaction, and the ramping up of a rabidly privatizing economic order we have since taken to calling, a little gauzily, “neoliberalism.” There are stark and distressing clarities on offer even in slapstick, messy Vineland—about economy and security, about the bringing of militarized counterinsurgency back to the metropole, and above all about what the novel unblinkingly calls “the true nature of the police.” And these, with each new day, seem a little more vivid, a little more goddamn realist, and a little less the stuff of stoned counterfactual invention.”

Realism – how many sins have been committed in your name! I sorta want to patter. From the cracked mirror of a servant girl, to use Stephen Daedalus’s phrase, there are certain legatees who have inherited the crack. From that cracked perspective, the world that ordinarily appears as it is defined by the class who creates public opinion appears differently. It is shrouded in apocalypse and slapstick. It is, indeed, the world of hysteros, the womb, but as well it is the world of hysteresis, out of joint with the contemporary, the synchronic world in which we are all on the same page – good guys over here, bad guys over there, and thus it shall ever be.  Pynchon’s tendency to find the bad guys running the American imperium is just the kind of idea that the New Republic, in its glory days,  took on the task of squashing.

Coviello speaks of the book as “unloved”. The first time I read it, which happened in some never-never – in New Haven? In Atlanta? I don’t know – I do recall feeling that this is not the rush I expected after Gravity’s Rainbow. The latter dogs all of Pynchon’s afternovels – there are moments – there are even hundreds of pages in novels like Against the Day, where that magic touch and text comes alive once again, but these novels are distinctly different. Re-reading Vineland, I can see that difference now as a virtue – the intentional immersion in TV trivia, much different than immersion in the polytides of chemistry because we are all experts here, is a deliberate blow against the cult of expertise, against the insider knowing, that can lead a Pynchon reader into a certain fatal fandom. A fandom that is, among other things, all too politically easy – and leads to the kind of relaxed authoritarianism that makes American power so dangerous. Vineland, set not so accidentally in 1984, touches on all the topics of the non-serious, para-political left, like the archipelago of secret police, informers, and violent interventions that run through the recent history of the U.S.  Unlike  that left, which is premised on a certain notion of American innocence being hijacked by bad guy conspirators, Pynchon’s book is all about various stages and stooges of collaboration. Pynchon is the last person to make a cult of, say, JFK, who figures in Gravity’s Rainbow in contrast with Malcolm X, in a language become bubblegum and goofy. Innocence just isn’t in it – fall comes after fall. In this sense, it stages, decades before this became the issue de jour, the project of giving a critical history of the U.S. And just as the 1619 project became a cause among the remnant of Cold War liberals who want to rescue America as a good guy against the America founded as a slaveowning republic, so, too, Pynchon’s work is inherently rebarbative to the liberal humanist notion of what the novel should be.