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Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon's Novel
The publication of Thomas Pynchon's novel Vineland in 1990, 17 years after his epochal Gravity's Rainbow, received unprecedented attention from the media and tens of thousands of readers, all wondering why the novel was so long in the making and whether it would be as momentous as his last novel. The Vineland Papers is the first book-length study of Pynchon's problematic new a dozen leading Pynchon critics offer their takes on the book examining it from a variety of its relation to Pynchon's previous work, its humor, its use of various technical fields, its use of history and film, its politics, its structure, and its autobiographical elements. Feminist theory is brought to bear on Pynchon's representation of women in the novel by several of the contributors, and all of them write in an accessible manner so that the book will appeal to the general reader as well as the scholar. For many readers and scholars alike Pynchon is the single most important living novelist, and The Vineland Papers is invaluable for understanding how his fourth novel alters or confirms that reputation. The contributors include David Cowart, N. Katherine Hayles, David Porush, Elaine B. Safer, Joseph Slade, Joseph Tabbi, Susan Strehle, Stacey Olster, Molly Hite, William E. Grim, Eric Solomon, Andrew Gordon, and Clifford Mead.
191 pages, Paperback
First published February 1, 1994
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June 19, 2017
Common wisdom is that Vineland heralds the second phase of Thomas Pynchon. It’s the start of the more humane, less nihilist man who puts value on family and the small vices needed to survive the day to day. On reflection, though, I think it still belongs with the first three. It helps set a pattern. Book 1, V., is a huge, billowy epic with multiple historical time periods and locations, a crush of historical moments and movements far beyond the surface-level tourism of the Baedekker guidebooks it frequently mocks. Gravity’s Rainbow is the same, but even more so. The book between, The Crying of Lot 49, is well-regarded, but generally dismissed as insubstantial, a “short story with gland trouble,” as Pynchon himself called it. My criticism of it (small but real) was that it seemed like a big book masquerading as a small book – the hyper-dense compost of allusion, referent, science, and decay, that “high magic to low puns” style that felt like a compressed, hyper-cooled version of its predecessor. At the same time, though, it’s not just a breather, but a recapitulation of the themes of the first book in concise mode.
Reading Vineland soon after its predecessor (rather than 17 years later), I felt its connections to the previous book more than its disconnections. Sure, the low puns tend to overshadow the high magic at times (all the one-note TV parodies, such as “Pia Zadora in The Clara Bow Story”) and the structure isn’t a fraction of the aggressive skyscraper that is GR. But from where I sit, now 3/5th of the way through Mason & Dixon, and it, not Vineland, feels more like the new way forward. Vineland still has this discursive, rambling quality, the way a scene can be set for pages before anyone says a word, or the aggressive digressions into the past on a moment’s notice, the thick history of hippies and blacklisted actors and lumber union organizers interleaved atop one another in shifting configurations. Even if it took 17 years to get there, it has the same sense of super-cooling and compressing the previous novel, taking its themes and re-framing them with greater economy.
This collection of essays about arguably Pynchon’s most contentious book came out a mere four years after the book’s release. Its authors avoid the trap that Harold Bloom and Michiko Kakutani (and I) make by relentlessly comparing it to the previous books. It’s understood that this is a new book for a new era, and the essayists use their skills to dig into the book not with intertextuality (comparison with the classics, or even Pynchon’s own oeuvre), but group theory, feminist literary theory, postmodernism, and historicist analysis. The result was a bit shocking – not only was I surprised to find out how much I missed, but honestly, how badly I misinterpreted even key plot points of the book! In my defense, I was reading this just after the horrible events of November 9, so I was in a bit of a fog, without question. Still, the thing that ties this back to the early books, to me, is just how hazily some of the main moments of the book come to you…a single, deliberately misleading sentence is often the only hinge point on the entire arc of the story. So with that in mind, let’s look at each piece.
David Cowart’s “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland” posits that “Pynchon…may have spent some of the last twenty years discovering the limits of the postmodernist aesthetic.” He suggests that one of the things that may have made Bloom and Kakutani tut-tut this book was the fact that “Vineland does not seem to be ‘self-reflexive’ in the approved contemporary manner,” and “in contrast to his previous common practice, he catalogs [pop culture and] nothing else.” Even Lot 49, for all its Hippie whimsy and menace, still dipped back into Jacobean revenge dramas and European postal conspiracies. The furthest back we go here is the Northern California lumber strikes of the ‘30s. Cowart’s argument boils down to “Pynchon is so steeped in history, he doesn’t even need to SHOW it to you!” suggesting that “Pynchon contrives, by diving into the wreck of mythic metanarrative, to imbue with extraordinary historical resonance a story that ostensibly depicts the vitiation of the historical sense.” In other words, I think, he builds a comparable deep history for an generation that can’t even remember who Clara Bow is.
N. Kathleen Hayle winds down an intriguing analytic path in “Who Was Saved? Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland.” A big part of this book is given over, like GR, to created families, new social structures that come together when previous familial and social bonds are broken. There are so many of these structures through the book – the hippies, the filmmaking collective, the brotherhood of snitches in the FBI, the network of the blacklisted in Hollywood, the female ninja school in the mountains – with certain members fluidly passing between them. It doesn’t aim to create a new thing, but to tie together impressions you may have noticed into an ongoing theme within the book. It’s very good.
David Porush’s “Purring Into Transcendence: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine” concentrates both on all the great turns of phrase (“So many of his sentences would make good titles for papers”), as well as his evolving take on machines and machinery here. Remember in V., the great despair is that people are becoming less human and more machine-like. Porush thinks that Prairie’s computer research and the Ninja academy’s Puncutron machine – a cross between acupuncture and a dot matrix printer – show Pynchon seeing the possible benefits of technology, even if he still asserts that using your credit card gives Them more information about you than you should like. By the end, he makes a grand statement: “In Vineland, Pynchon has not only not lost his touch, but he has brought into sharper focus his system, or let us say, the posture, disposition, fundamental commitment as artist, behavior mode, style that we have watched evolve through his previous fictions. By showing us how the lives of his characters are oppressed by systems of motives that lie beyond their influence, Vineland’s plots seem fundamentally committed to making us understand how ontology, our at times inexpressive immersions in life, is influenced by and founded on our epistemologies, our systems of understanding. At the same time, Pynchon’s style itself…seems bent on making us experience how our epistemologies are already fated and determined by our ontologies, by how we are immersed in our lives. Finally and at the same time, the machinery of his narrative is devoted to convincing us that a transcendental realm lies beyond both epistemology and ontology as they dissolve into each other, a transcendental realm that Pynchon occasionally salutes, and at which he asks us to laugh.” Bloom et. al. hate how grounded in crap pop culture this book is, but the point is we’re all grounded in crap pop culture (well, I’m sure Bloom will tell you he doesn’t even *own* a TV, but whatever), and strategies out of the Tube are as or more vital than strategies out of The Zone.
Elaine B. Safer’s “Pynchon World and Its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland” talks to us about humor. It also brings up Gaddis and Barth, so we’re talking humor on a pretty lofty level. Sections include “Myths and Decline,” “Urban Legends and The Tube,” “From Pastoral Shopping to the Shopping Mall,” and so forth. It’s an excellent piece on signs and symbols and classical transpositions of modern-day contrivances. And like most literary theory, it manages to be about humor without being at all funny.
There’s not much I need to say about Joseph W. Slade’s “Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland” except to quote this moment: “Like Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, one of Pynchon’s major influences, Vineland deals with the difficulties of establishing and maintaining genuine human relationships in a culture in which the electronic medium mimics community.” Ahem. Hi, Goodreads.
Joseph Tabbi’s “Pynchon’s Groundward Art” tackles an issue seemingly in the mind of Pynchon himself. He notes Pynchon’s dismissal (via his few non-fictional pieces, such as the introduction to the Slow Learner collection and his introduction to a reprint of Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me), critiquing his own story “Entropy” as too abstract, saying that he “preferred a fiction that had some ‘grounding in human reality’ and an authenticity ‘found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.’” In this way, Vineland might be seen as a forcefully attempt to ground his fiction in the present-day, not the stylized postmodernist realms of books like Lot 49. Tabbi sees Vineland as a pulling out of the “ever-narrowing cultural margins” of Postmodernism and trying to live in the world as it is. This is one of the few essays here that thoroughly analyzes the book, but ultimately doesn’t praise it: “For the moment, the best we can do is to continue to work through the refractoriness and literary complexity of Gravity’s Rainbow, and hope that Vineland turns out to be only an outrider for a hardier, more resilient fiction.” Mee-YOW!
I enjoyed Susan Strehe’s “Pynchon’s ‘Elaborate Game of Doubles’ in Vineland,” as it clarifies something I kind of felt, but didn’t pull together: the way that so many characters either are paired with one another (for adventures, research, escape, or revenge) or acts as a complimentary double to someone else in the book. “For Pynchon,” Strehe writes, “the order that makes plot meaningful is not established according to the old-fashioned principles of unity and economy, the full working-out of implications inherent in a single situation…rather, the narrative develops its own unique logic of connectedness through permutations, comparisons, inversions, and variations.”
The funny titles keep coming with Stacey Olster’s “When You’re a (Nin)jette, You’re a (Nin)jette all the way – or are you? Female Filmmaking in Vineland.” As you’d imagine, film theory is on tap here. She talks both about the film collective 24fps, which several of the characters belong to, and also the barrage of fake TV and movie titles in the book, as well as the ‘80s phenomenon of the Ninja, especially as seen in the books by Eric Van Lustbader. There is also discussion of female friendship (a bit of a rare commodity in some of Pynchon’s books), film guerrillas vs. political ones, and the cinematic qualities of the rebel.
Most intriguing to me going in was Molly Hite’s “Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland,” and it does have a lot of good stuff to work with. She starts with the line near the end of the book, when Brock Vond’s attempt to kidnap Prairie is thwarted by sudden budget cuts in the government, and his helicopter, just about to lower onto Prairie and scoop her up, suddenly pulls away. “Suddenly,” writes Pynchon, “some white male far away must have wakened from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over.” Hite reads this as evolution: “The adjectives ‘white’ and ‘male,’ precisely because they are unremarkable and even redundant, insist that power is a function of privilege and that privilege has racial and gender parameters. This insistence makes the oppositional Other of the fictional universe less abstract than in any of the previous novels.” She cites several Feminist texts that Pynchon quotes in the book, such as Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men and Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman In the Attic, to show that Pynchon indeed keeps up with the times. Her primary hypothesis is that Pynchon seems to be saying that the image of masculinity is a social construction of the world, and subject to fluid interpretation. There’s lots of interesting stuff in here (and copious footnotes), but would have loved for Hite to talk a bit about the book’s overarching notion that Frenesi and others fell for Brock Vond because they couldn’t resist the allure of authority, power, “a man in uniform,” such as it were. It’s one of the biggest issues I have with the book, crusty ‘ol Pynchon’s assertion (or at least the assertion of several of his characters) that every dream of freedom from fascism falls flat because, at heart, people really crave fascism, and, seemingly, women most of all. It struck me as a bit of Eve-shaming, and though I’d be thrilled to be corrected on this point, Hite doesn’t bring it up at all.
William E. Grim’s “’Good-bye, Columbus’: Postmodernist Satire in Vineland” is the inevitable essay on Postmodernism. It’s a decent, easy-to-follow introduction to the concept of Postmodernism and humor (“Postmodernist satire concentrates on a calculating reuse of the past that appears on the surface to be innocent, but is in actuality the quintessence of sophistication…additionally, postmodernist satire is an exaggeration of modernist techniques to the extreme”), before drilling down very, very deep into a small section of the book – Chapter 9, to be precise – a section that’s fairly unimportant in the scope of the book, but which Grim finds to be a wealth of postmodernist humor and insight. This is a really great essay. Every single paragraph of the chapter is broken down to show exactly what Pynchon knew about Columbus, and when he knew it. He basically does the thing that those internet nerds did when they triangulated which day Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day” was about. He uses clues form the chapter (heavy smog, vacuum cleaner parts factory) to precisely triangulate character DL Chastain’s location in the city (“in a relatively small geographical portion of the city and can be identified without too much difficulty, not unlike the way in which the various locales of Dublin are described in Joyce’s Ulysses”). It’s a remarkable chapter. It makes you wish someone like Grim would have a go at a book-length companion to Vineland in the manner of Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion.
Eric Solomon sends us around the penultimate lap with a short piece called “Argument by Anachronism: The Presence of the 1930s in Vineland.” Like Eliot and Joyce (always with the Joyce), Solomon notes that “Pynchon, much given to modernist forms such as parody and references to earlier models, incorporates into Vineland events and characteristics of the thirties to allow his present time – the sixties and eighties – to refer back to prior events without strain. Thus, the novel is enriched by its own belatedness, by a nostalgia for the nearly dead conventions of formulaic left-wing protest fiction. Just as V. seems to anthologize (and parody) an earlier decade of anti-colonialist fiction, so Vineland will not let go of the 1930s dreams/nightmares.”
Finally, Andrew Gordon leads us out with a fun, frivolous remembrance called “Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir.” It’s just a straight-up bit of remembrance and fun, discussing how writing a paper in college (in the early ‘60s) about V. attracted Pynchon’s attention (via a girlfriend who showed him the paper), leading to a night of many joints, a few cheeseburgers, and some firecrackers. No great insights are revealed – Pynchon, to the surprise of no one, is reserved, shy, but courteous and more or less put-together. He’ll talk and listen for hours on things he’s interested in, and can amply keep up his end of conversation, but doesn’t ever want to talk about his own work. This one’s on the internet somewhere, so you can read it even if you can’t track down this book.
This is an important book precisely because of its subject. (The book, not Pynchon.) Though there are fewer (if any) book-length works on the recent books, the return of Vineland after long hiatus meant that there was a lot to talk about. Pynchon was a sort of literary Rip Van Winkle, disappearing in one decade and appearing nearly two decades hence. Once the books started coming dependably with a less than 10 year delay between them, the anticipation of a new book wasn’t quite so weighty. At least half of The Vineland Papers was edifying and genuinely enhanced my appreciation for the book. The other half was at least interesting, much like the novel itself.
Reading Vineland soon after its predecessor (rather than 17 years later), I felt its connections to the previous book more than its disconnections. Sure, the low puns tend to overshadow the high magic at times (all the one-note TV parodies, such as “Pia Zadora in The Clara Bow Story”) and the structure isn’t a fraction of the aggressive skyscraper that is GR. But from where I sit, now 3/5th of the way through Mason & Dixon, and it, not Vineland, feels more like the new way forward. Vineland still has this discursive, rambling quality, the way a scene can be set for pages before anyone says a word, or the aggressive digressions into the past on a moment’s notice, the thick history of hippies and blacklisted actors and lumber union organizers interleaved atop one another in shifting configurations. Even if it took 17 years to get there, it has the same sense of super-cooling and compressing the previous novel, taking its themes and re-framing them with greater economy.
This collection of essays about arguably Pynchon’s most contentious book came out a mere four years after the book’s release. Its authors avoid the trap that Harold Bloom and Michiko Kakutani (and I) make by relentlessly comparing it to the previous books. It’s understood that this is a new book for a new era, and the essayists use their skills to dig into the book not with intertextuality (comparison with the classics, or even Pynchon’s own oeuvre), but group theory, feminist literary theory, postmodernism, and historicist analysis. The result was a bit shocking – not only was I surprised to find out how much I missed, but honestly, how badly I misinterpreted even key plot points of the book! In my defense, I was reading this just after the horrible events of November 9, so I was in a bit of a fog, without question. Still, the thing that ties this back to the early books, to me, is just how hazily some of the main moments of the book come to you…a single, deliberately misleading sentence is often the only hinge point on the entire arc of the story. So with that in mind, let’s look at each piece.
David Cowart’s “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland” posits that “Pynchon…may have spent some of the last twenty years discovering the limits of the postmodernist aesthetic.” He suggests that one of the things that may have made Bloom and Kakutani tut-tut this book was the fact that “Vineland does not seem to be ‘self-reflexive’ in the approved contemporary manner,” and “in contrast to his previous common practice, he catalogs [pop culture and] nothing else.” Even Lot 49, for all its Hippie whimsy and menace, still dipped back into Jacobean revenge dramas and European postal conspiracies. The furthest back we go here is the Northern California lumber strikes of the ‘30s. Cowart’s argument boils down to “Pynchon is so steeped in history, he doesn’t even need to SHOW it to you!” suggesting that “Pynchon contrives, by diving into the wreck of mythic metanarrative, to imbue with extraordinary historical resonance a story that ostensibly depicts the vitiation of the historical sense.” In other words, I think, he builds a comparable deep history for an generation that can’t even remember who Clara Bow is.
N. Kathleen Hayle winds down an intriguing analytic path in “Who Was Saved? Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland.” A big part of this book is given over, like GR, to created families, new social structures that come together when previous familial and social bonds are broken. There are so many of these structures through the book – the hippies, the filmmaking collective, the brotherhood of snitches in the FBI, the network of the blacklisted in Hollywood, the female ninja school in the mountains – with certain members fluidly passing between them. It doesn’t aim to create a new thing, but to tie together impressions you may have noticed into an ongoing theme within the book. It’s very good.
David Porush’s “Purring Into Transcendence: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine” concentrates both on all the great turns of phrase (“So many of his sentences would make good titles for papers”), as well as his evolving take on machines and machinery here. Remember in V., the great despair is that people are becoming less human and more machine-like. Porush thinks that Prairie’s computer research and the Ninja academy’s Puncutron machine – a cross between acupuncture and a dot matrix printer – show Pynchon seeing the possible benefits of technology, even if he still asserts that using your credit card gives Them more information about you than you should like. By the end, he makes a grand statement: “In Vineland, Pynchon has not only not lost his touch, but he has brought into sharper focus his system, or let us say, the posture, disposition, fundamental commitment as artist, behavior mode, style that we have watched evolve through his previous fictions. By showing us how the lives of his characters are oppressed by systems of motives that lie beyond their influence, Vineland’s plots seem fundamentally committed to making us understand how ontology, our at times inexpressive immersions in life, is influenced by and founded on our epistemologies, our systems of understanding. At the same time, Pynchon’s style itself…seems bent on making us experience how our epistemologies are already fated and determined by our ontologies, by how we are immersed in our lives. Finally and at the same time, the machinery of his narrative is devoted to convincing us that a transcendental realm lies beyond both epistemology and ontology as they dissolve into each other, a transcendental realm that Pynchon occasionally salutes, and at which he asks us to laugh.” Bloom et. al. hate how grounded in crap pop culture this book is, but the point is we’re all grounded in crap pop culture (well, I’m sure Bloom will tell you he doesn’t even *own* a TV, but whatever), and strategies out of the Tube are as or more vital than strategies out of The Zone.
Elaine B. Safer’s “Pynchon World and Its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland” talks to us about humor. It also brings up Gaddis and Barth, so we’re talking humor on a pretty lofty level. Sections include “Myths and Decline,” “Urban Legends and The Tube,” “From Pastoral Shopping to the Shopping Mall,” and so forth. It’s an excellent piece on signs and symbols and classical transpositions of modern-day contrivances. And like most literary theory, it manages to be about humor without being at all funny.
There’s not much I need to say about Joseph W. Slade’s “Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland” except to quote this moment: “Like Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, one of Pynchon’s major influences, Vineland deals with the difficulties of establishing and maintaining genuine human relationships in a culture in which the electronic medium mimics community.” Ahem. Hi, Goodreads.
Joseph Tabbi’s “Pynchon’s Groundward Art” tackles an issue seemingly in the mind of Pynchon himself. He notes Pynchon’s dismissal (via his few non-fictional pieces, such as the introduction to the Slow Learner collection and his introduction to a reprint of Richard Farina’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me), critiquing his own story “Entropy” as too abstract, saying that he “preferred a fiction that had some ‘grounding in human reality’ and an authenticity ‘found and taken up, always at a cost, from deeper, more shared levels of the life we all really live.’” In this way, Vineland might be seen as a forcefully attempt to ground his fiction in the present-day, not the stylized postmodernist realms of books like Lot 49. Tabbi sees Vineland as a pulling out of the “ever-narrowing cultural margins” of Postmodernism and trying to live in the world as it is. This is one of the few essays here that thoroughly analyzes the book, but ultimately doesn’t praise it: “For the moment, the best we can do is to continue to work through the refractoriness and literary complexity of Gravity’s Rainbow, and hope that Vineland turns out to be only an outrider for a hardier, more resilient fiction.” Mee-YOW!
I enjoyed Susan Strehe’s “Pynchon’s ‘Elaborate Game of Doubles’ in Vineland,” as it clarifies something I kind of felt, but didn’t pull together: the way that so many characters either are paired with one another (for adventures, research, escape, or revenge) or acts as a complimentary double to someone else in the book. “For Pynchon,” Strehe writes, “the order that makes plot meaningful is not established according to the old-fashioned principles of unity and economy, the full working-out of implications inherent in a single situation…rather, the narrative develops its own unique logic of connectedness through permutations, comparisons, inversions, and variations.”
The funny titles keep coming with Stacey Olster’s “When You’re a (Nin)jette, You’re a (Nin)jette all the way – or are you? Female Filmmaking in Vineland.” As you’d imagine, film theory is on tap here. She talks both about the film collective 24fps, which several of the characters belong to, and also the barrage of fake TV and movie titles in the book, as well as the ‘80s phenomenon of the Ninja, especially as seen in the books by Eric Van Lustbader. There is also discussion of female friendship (a bit of a rare commodity in some of Pynchon’s books), film guerrillas vs. political ones, and the cinematic qualities of the rebel.
Most intriguing to me going in was Molly Hite’s “Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland,” and it does have a lot of good stuff to work with. She starts with the line near the end of the book, when Brock Vond’s attempt to kidnap Prairie is thwarted by sudden budget cuts in the government, and his helicopter, just about to lower onto Prairie and scoop her up, suddenly pulls away. “Suddenly,” writes Pynchon, “some white male far away must have wakened from a dream, and just like that, the clambake was over.” Hite reads this as evolution: “The adjectives ‘white’ and ‘male,’ precisely because they are unremarkable and even redundant, insist that power is a function of privilege and that privilege has racial and gender parameters. This insistence makes the oppositional Other of the fictional universe less abstract than in any of the previous novels.” She cites several Feminist texts that Pynchon quotes in the book, such as Eve Sedgwick’s Between Men and Sandra Gilbert & Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman In the Attic, to show that Pynchon indeed keeps up with the times. Her primary hypothesis is that Pynchon seems to be saying that the image of masculinity is a social construction of the world, and subject to fluid interpretation. There’s lots of interesting stuff in here (and copious footnotes), but would have loved for Hite to talk a bit about the book’s overarching notion that Frenesi and others fell for Brock Vond because they couldn’t resist the allure of authority, power, “a man in uniform,” such as it were. It’s one of the biggest issues I have with the book, crusty ‘ol Pynchon’s assertion (or at least the assertion of several of his characters) that every dream of freedom from fascism falls flat because, at heart, people really crave fascism, and, seemingly, women most of all. It struck me as a bit of Eve-shaming, and though I’d be thrilled to be corrected on this point, Hite doesn’t bring it up at all.
William E. Grim’s “’Good-bye, Columbus’: Postmodernist Satire in Vineland” is the inevitable essay on Postmodernism. It’s a decent, easy-to-follow introduction to the concept of Postmodernism and humor (“Postmodernist satire concentrates on a calculating reuse of the past that appears on the surface to be innocent, but is in actuality the quintessence of sophistication…additionally, postmodernist satire is an exaggeration of modernist techniques to the extreme”), before drilling down very, very deep into a small section of the book – Chapter 9, to be precise – a section that’s fairly unimportant in the scope of the book, but which Grim finds to be a wealth of postmodernist humor and insight. This is a really great essay. Every single paragraph of the chapter is broken down to show exactly what Pynchon knew about Columbus, and when he knew it. He basically does the thing that those internet nerds did when they triangulated which day Ice Cube’s “It Was A Good Day” was about. He uses clues form the chapter (heavy smog, vacuum cleaner parts factory) to precisely triangulate character DL Chastain’s location in the city (“in a relatively small geographical portion of the city and can be identified without too much difficulty, not unlike the way in which the various locales of Dublin are described in Joyce’s Ulysses”). It’s a remarkable chapter. It makes you wish someone like Grim would have a go at a book-length companion to Vineland in the manner of Steven Weisenburger’s A Gravity’s Rainbow Companion.
Eric Solomon sends us around the penultimate lap with a short piece called “Argument by Anachronism: The Presence of the 1930s in Vineland.” Like Eliot and Joyce (always with the Joyce), Solomon notes that “Pynchon, much given to modernist forms such as parody and references to earlier models, incorporates into Vineland events and characteristics of the thirties to allow his present time – the sixties and eighties – to refer back to prior events without strain. Thus, the novel is enriched by its own belatedness, by a nostalgia for the nearly dead conventions of formulaic left-wing protest fiction. Just as V. seems to anthologize (and parody) an earlier decade of anti-colonialist fiction, so Vineland will not let go of the 1930s dreams/nightmares.”
Finally, Andrew Gordon leads us out with a fun, frivolous remembrance called “Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir.” It’s just a straight-up bit of remembrance and fun, discussing how writing a paper in college (in the early ‘60s) about V. attracted Pynchon’s attention (via a girlfriend who showed him the paper), leading to a night of many joints, a few cheeseburgers, and some firecrackers. No great insights are revealed – Pynchon, to the surprise of no one, is reserved, shy, but courteous and more or less put-together. He’ll talk and listen for hours on things he’s interested in, and can amply keep up his end of conversation, but doesn’t ever want to talk about his own work. This one’s on the internet somewhere, so you can read it even if you can’t track down this book.
This is an important book precisely because of its subject. (The book, not Pynchon.) Though there are fewer (if any) book-length works on the recent books, the return of Vineland after long hiatus meant that there was a lot to talk about. Pynchon was a sort of literary Rip Van Winkle, disappearing in one decade and appearing nearly two decades hence. Once the books started coming dependably with a less than 10 year delay between them, the anticipation of a new book wasn’t quite so weighty. At least half of The Vineland Papers was edifying and genuinely enhanced my appreciation for the book. The other half was at least interesting, much like the novel itself.
March 12, 2018
Particularly strong:
Susan Strehle, Pynchon's "Elaborate Game of Doubles" in Vineland (pp 101-18), and
Molly Hite, Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland (pp 135-53).
Susan Strehle, Pynchon's "Elaborate Game of Doubles" in Vineland (pp 101-18), and
Molly Hite, Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland (pp 135-53).
October 26, 2013
первый и, как оказывается, до сих пор, похоже, единственный критический сборник по роману, ныне довольно-таки редкость. в частности, он подкрепляет подозрение, что роман-то не так прост, как хотелось бы, и что свои 17 лет автор не в носу ковырял
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews