Fled is that music

On Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

Hello,

It’s the season of mists, and I’ve been off and away. I spent a little extended time in New Orleans for mysterious ritual purposes, i.e. a wedding. Only a few nights ago I met on a dark Gulf Coast street a black cat so dirty I had to wash my hands immediately after distributing the head scratches that were demanded of me. I take seriously the alien divinity of cats. New Orleans is full of them. An ashen streak of dust stretched across my shoe where the cat had scraped its head before falling on its side and rolling in even more dirt next to the sidewalk. The gods revel in the rough and tumble materiality of our world. And Halloween approaches.

Today, if I can manage it, a consideration of Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland. See my previous Pynchon excursions on V., The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow, or Slow Learner. This time, a brief look at Pynchon’s music, then an attempt to get at a novel that seems unfairly dismissed or forgotten. I’m tempted to be perverse and say that Vineland is my favorite of Pynchon’s novels that I’ve read so far, but that would be silly, wouldn’t it?

Thanks for reading,

Mike

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The first thing you may notice about Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel and the first one he published following a 17-year gap after Gravity’s Rainbow came out in 1973, is that it takes almost 50 pages for Pynchon to include one of his trademark “stupid songs.” Even then it’s only three lines, although in fairness these lines constitute a jingle for a fictional lawn-care service and hinge on the immortally stupid pun “Marquis de Sod.” This, anyway, is the longest it takes Pynchon to get to a song in his entire novel-writing career up to that point. V. features a song on page 1, The Crying of Lot 49 page 16. Gravity’s Rainbow takes all of 9 pages. After Vineland, Mason & Dixon (page 18) and Against the Day (page 15) suggest a return to form, but Inherent Vice again takes almost 50 pages, and Bleeding Edge contains no ditty or doggerel until page 152, which is almost as long as the entirety of The Crying of Lot 49: an empty, windblown canyon of Pynchonian tunelessness.¹

What makes Pynchon’s songs funny and fetching, to my ear, is that they appeal to the ear at all. You can hear them. In their punctuation (dashes or onomatopoeic repetition of letters, e.g. nee-eed, U-U-zi), enjambment, syllable count, and rhyme, Pynchon’s songs feel singable in a variety of pop modes, including country, jazz, and rock,² even when no clear melody is offered. Sometimes he does provide a melody, such as when he specifies that the French national anthem serves as the tune for the jingle ending on “Marquis de Sod.” No matter the typical lack of tune, you feel the rhythm according to which Pynchon’s songs ought to be sung. And since rhythm (how long notes last, how quickly they are succeeded by other notes) is the soul of melody, I have more than once tried out Pynchon’s songs with made-up ditties that are not at all hard to improvise. The music in the words comes to the surface so easily. More than once they sounded like ripoffs of early Beatles songs or like crooning Beach Boys anthems. Consider, in this spirit, a Pynchonian moment in the television show Mad Men, when the friendly fool Freddy Rumsen emerges from his office to “play” the opening of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik by yanking the zipper on his pants up and down, an absurd illustration of a rather technical musical truth: melody is rhythm.

Of all this, one can make very little. Or, alternatively, far too much. In the case of Vineland, the reason Pynchon waits on his stupid songs is that he has a lot of serious novelistic business to attend to before the usual antics can begin. He sets up more suspenseful promises of plot than usual (a quest for a lost mother, a giving chase to the enemy, an expulsion from home). Which of course is slightly wrong, in the sense that the first couple of chapters of the novel also introduce the character Zoyd Wheeler and his annual zany act of “madness” to ensure the continued distribution of his government disability checks. Wheeler arranges, as he does in some way, shape, or form every year, to throw himself through the front window of a bar. In this case, he’ll do it dressed as a woman while being filmed by an accommodating gaggle of representatives from the local news. Zoyd’s ritual plays for television like the annual watch for Punxsutawney Phil (another Pynchonian figure [you really start to notice them everywhere]). Though Zoyd’s glass act represents a ritual enactment of madness, it is more or less exhausted by administrative reality. The gesture means almost nothing, except as a joke in a Pynchon novel. This is Pynchon’s point. It’s hardly a protest and much less a demonstration of craziness; it’s checking a box on a form read by a machine. In Gravity’s Rainbow, the “real and only fucking,” i.e. the fucking over, happened on paper. In Vineland, it’s by computer, because Pynchon catches on quick. Even the way he depicts television in this novel prefigures everywhere and always the modern surveillant internet.

This year, though, the bar Zoyd selected as the locale for his scheduled theater of the absurd has been made over and gentrified. He can’t bring himself to destroy anything there. His friend owns the place and invested all this money to spruce it up. When another of Zoyd’s friends, Van Meter, calls to say everything is ready and waiting, with cameras and multiple news crews, at a place called the Cucumber Lounge, Zoyd heads over and does the deed, rather halfheartedly. Only afterward does he realize that even the window had been replaced, for his convenience, with breakaway glass, the kind used in the movies. Everything, excepting perhaps certain aspects of the freedom of spirit, that had been fresh and revolutionary in 60s hippie leftism has gone the way of cheap reenactment and commercial routine. This is 1984, but the repression and the freedom fighting are a far cry from Orwell. More diffuse.

Even the backwoods northern California setting of the novel, supposed to be a refuge for 60s burnouts, appears to be in the process of commercial colonization. Japanese companies buy up “unprocessed logs as fast as forests could be clearcut.” When Zoyd is told that, despite the gentrification of the bar, its customers are still “country fellas,” he quips, “From the looks of your parking lot, the country must be Germany.” Globalism at its import/export finest. Plus, well-funded producers are making films like Return of the Jedi in the redwoods nearby. What had been rebellion before maturing into retreat has succumbed at last to mass culture and unbridled commerce. Everyone in Vineland also obsessively watches the “Tube.” Pynchon must have read quite closely Neil Postman’s 1985 hit screed, Amusing Ourselves to Death, but then again, I think Postman probably read Pynchon first.

The point of Vineland, however, is not the victimization of leftist revolutionaries. Its aims are sweeter, sadder, even more mellow for all the touches of brutal police action. While radicals and anti-government anarchists are certainly preyed upon by the likes of federal prosecutor Brock Vond and other agents of reaction, the novel tells a story much more attuned to half-comical frailties of character, both of parents and children, conveyed mostly in extended backstory.

Zoyd had a child named Prairie with a woman named Frenesi Gates, who’s now long gone after selling out her comrades to Brock Vond before entering a witness protection program. Frenesi had worked as a filmmaker for a radical political terrorist group, something like the Weather Underground, making propaganda intended for “lighting up things the network never would.” A realist rather than a fantasist, as she sees it, Frenesi has particular dreams of enlightenment, both literal and political. When one of her colleagues skeptically argues for the use of “available light,” including natural light, Frenesi advocates instead for “pouring in as much light as they could liberate from the local power company.” To do so, she manipulates a variety of equipment and techniques she learned from her blacklisted, unionist Hollywood technician father. (Most characters in this novel struggle with, against, and for parents who wanted to change the world in the name of justice.) The “Central Power” fascinates Frenesi, a fascination the technophilic/phobic Pynchon shares:

[devices and equipment] 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. Often, through some dense lightning-shot stirring of night on night, she would be just about to see Its face when her waking mind would kick in and send her spreading awake into what should have been the world newly formatted, even innocent, but from which, as it proved, the creature had not after all been banished, only become, for a while, less visible.

Frenesi, like Pynchon, can’t quite decide how literal this surveilling and world-enwrapping power is. She only knows how mesmerizing are its effects. Does it concretely work itself out in technology like an alien virus or embody the concatenated impulses of human beings like a magic spell? Power appears to Frenesi either to abuse an innocent world or be baked into it like original sin.

Maybe there exists no technical answer, but Frenesi doesn’t share the feeling of her more hardcore colleagues that the “camera is a gun” and “film demands sacrifice.” She she also doesn’t share the skepticism of those who feel “you don’t die for no motherfuckin’ shadows.” Frenesi believes instead in a sustained or suspended hope, a dedication to making her films and looking for and at the workings of power: “Long as we have the light… long as we’re runnin’ that juice in, we’re OK.” But it also sounds like a compulsion, almost an addiction. That compulsion becomes more fraught when Frenesi realizes her attraction to the reactionary Brock Vond. She has inherited, the novel explains, a weakness for men in uniform and the stature of authority. She’s drawn to the erotic potentials of power, the pleasures of playful submission. It’s comical but also serious. Frailty, as Hamlet said of Gertrude his mother marrying his uncle, thy name is woman—the gendered slight Vineland exists, in part, to wonder about and interrogate.

Pynchon knows that Frenesi is the novel’s most compelling character. That’s the Zoyd- and then Prairie-eyed view of Vineland’s entropic universe, too; everything turns back to Frenesi. (Prairie is nearly as compelling as her mom.) At his more-manufactured-than-he-had-realized glass shattering, Zoyd encounters again an old nemesis, DEA agent Hector Zuñiga. Zuñiga may be escaped from a recovery program for television addicts, but he’s come to tell Zoyd that Frenesi is free. She’s flown the coop after years in Vond’s program. Prairie gets wind and goes on a quest to find her, learning along the way the story of her mother’s life as a revolutionary, a filmmaker, a traitor, and a free woman. Vond’s quest for Frenesi brings him in the opposite direction, back to Vineland, so Zoyd has to abandon his home and, for stretches of the novel, disappear entirely.

As usual, Pynchon concocts too much and too densely for neat, concise summary. But behold Frenesi. She is Pynchon’s second go-round at the character Katje Borgesius from Gravity’s Rainbow. In that prior novel, Katje involved herself in a degrading and extreme S&M relationship with a German military official, Captain Blicero. She does so explicitly because the relationship represents a

formal, rationalized version of what, outside [i.e. in Europe during World II], proceeds without form or decent limit day and night, the summary executions, the roustings, beatings, subterfuge, paranoia, shame.

Far from being simplistically passive and submissive, Katje lives out a life of modulating rational choice and partial power in an insane world. She is not a prisoner. She elects to do what she wants; she makes mistakes. Later in the novel she plays dom (or is it sub again?) to a man who laps up her excrement at her command. However questionable the world, Katje makes choices in the name of her own security and autonomy. If it looks all fucked up, that’s because it is all fucked up.

The circumstances are quite different in many ways in Vineland, but Frenesi Gates likewise lives out her life according to the realization that a human being cannot be in total control. Her attraction to Brock Vond, moreover, is real. It distracts and ensorcels her. She likes the sex but also knows that she has entered

a brief time-out in the struggle, from which, if she’d chosen to, she also could have seen most, maybe all the way to the end, of what she could lose for this—OK, there he was, full-length, the whole package—for what? The fucking? Anything else?

It’s not clear that Frenesi believes the “struggle” will really emancipate anyone, much less her. The situation she confronts is threatening and volatile for all people: She has been filming at the campus of College of the Surf, where a reluctant and not entirely responsible math professor named Weed Atman has become a sort of countercultural cult leader for a strip of the California coast that has seceded from the United States. What’s the deal, you wonder. Tempting to repeat the questions: “The fucking? Anything else?”

Frenesi has become sexually involved with Weed as well as Brock, drawn perhaps again to a node of surprising male power. Atman and Vond may be (though this sounds like a put-down) the usual sort of Pynchon cartoons, but Frenesi is the human being among them. She gives their entanglements an additional gravity, though Vond is explicit that Frenesi is actually the sexual and physical connection between him and his ideological enemy Weed: “this little femme scampering back and forth with scented messages tucked in her little secret places.” Just listen to him! How does she stand him? Pynchon doesn’t seem quite in control of these characters and their exaggerated relationships. That’s at least adjacent to the point, however, for Brock Vond in all his crude braggadocio displaces onto Frenesi his own relative lack of control. He thinks all that matters are the men. Meanwhile Frenesi wonders about Vond’s homophobic fixations on how his body and Weed’s body touch each other through hers. Left and right inadequate to the tasks of sex and love. Then again, who is? Does “adequacy” come into it?

When Frenesi shares her radical film footage with Vond, soon enough it’s no different than sharing intelligence with the enemy. Pynchon makes it clear that both she and Vond are too young to fully know what they’re doing. Of Frenesi and her cohort in particular the novel has a clear vision. Frenesi as well as Brock and all Frenesi’s revolutionary comrades alike are “sixties children.” They run on libidinal energies almost impossible to fully corral and rationalize. There’s no Big Parent they obey (or is there?). Frenesi comes to a sad conclusion that could almost be Katje’s, a vision of the coming Reaction and its happy ignormasuses:

She understood as clearly as she could allow herself to what Brock wanted her to do, understood at last, dismally, that she might even do it—not for him, unhappy fucker, but because she had lost just too much control, time was rushing all around her, these were rapids, and as far ahead as she could see it looked like Brock’s stretch of the river, another stage, like sex, children, surgery, further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death, that those soldiered for, not yet and often never in on the secret, are always, at every age, children.

Life is soldiering, or so thinks this particular mind set on adult reconciliation with the beautiful nasty world. (Her friend DL later speculates to Prairie that Frenesi never really made any deliberate choices.) Where’s the light Frenesi talked about, where’s the “juice” running in? Where’s the “lighted doorway out in the American dark”? Alas too much time passes too quickly for fantasies of total (self-)control. Or is there time only for the fantasies? You’ve got to serve somebody, to crib Bob Dylan. And as both Frenesi and Katje know, you serve if you can a “rationalized version” of “what proceeds without form or decent limit day and night.” This should feel bleak and grim, but in Pynchon’s hands in Vineland it feels as much to be one of a sad realist’s many post-mortem thoughts on the death of the 60s.

That Frenesi ultimately helps Brock arrange, not quite on purpose, the shooting of Weed Atman seems the ultimate expression of her conflicted mixture of choice and folly. She manages all she can manage. Brock may be a child, but this stretch of the river of time belongs to him and his coming Reaganite soldiers of reaction. They are the happy children, the misoneists, the enemies of the New. Brock himself even has a sharp insight, though it may be modeled too closely on his relationship with Frenesi, who does, after all, leave him:

Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it.

The revolutionaries, by this logic, “need only to stay children forever.” Thus everyone in a madcap world accuses everyone else of being a child. This explains why in the end the novel imagines hell and earth as places that are in fact closely connected not by sin and punishment by a long-delayed reunion of hell with “Earth Unredeemed.” Heaven is all too distant. Hell and earth are all we know.

All this notwithstanding, Vineland may be Pynchon’s most affectionate novel. Though the book suggests that children may be the natural satirists of their parents, the relationship as Pynchon depicts it has an ineradicable sweetness and concern, a striving and confusion. He even dedicates the novel to his own parents. His theme here may simply be the ambivalent rapprochement between children and parents when the parents in particular had wanted to remake the world at large. (And I haven’t even mentioned the ninjas or the “Thanatoids,” who are in some way the living dead kept alive by their worldly resentments and trivial televisual interests.)

To draw these scattered thoughts to some sort of conclusion, I find funny and poignant two sections near the end of the novel, as the backstory rushes forward to meet the present of narrative time. The first of these scenes couldn’t be simpler and is only the portrait of a harried Zoyd Wheeler, taking care of an infant Prairie. Diaper changes, arresting police officers at the door, a tizzy of fatherhood spun into such vivid life I could have read a whole novel: Pynchon’s portrait of a single dad. The second scene leaps forward to Prairie’s adolescence for a bravura depiction of the absurdity and sanctuary of hanging out at the mall, skating and loitering. Prairie’s friendship with her best friend Ché has a hothouse mutual obsession, half erotic and half thrilled just to be on the verge of escape. Pynchon excels at episodes. The episodes are sometimes sublime.

And then there’s Vineland’s mysterious final scene, with Prairie waiting and hoping to meet, of all people and in a final gesture of misplaced hope, the now-dead Brock Vond. Could he be more reliable than her discordant, foolish, loving parents, who don’t in the end seem terribly capable of responsibility? Fled is that music. Prairie finds instead her lost dog. The dog thinks he’s home.

1. It looks like Shadow Ticket takes 22 pages.

2. It sounds so old-fashioned to say or write “rock.” Rock is dead, they used to say, with an irony intended to echo “God is dead,” except rock, unlike God, feels worse than dead. It feels passé. Even music that once was called “soft rock,” as an alternative to the supposedly dominant “harder” rock and roll, is now called “yacht rock,” as if there were no regular rock for it to be the “soft” version of anymore. Now the music has to be re-metaphorized entirely with reference to a fantasy of yachts that itself is connected to Jimmy Buffet, a soft rock icon with a surprisingly influential mash-up style.