Vineland Reread 9780231546041, 9780231185202, 9780231185219, 0231546041

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“Vineland Reread is a delight. Peter Coviello tells a sweet and joyous story about how to read and reread a treasured book, about how reading is an act that makes meaning, and about how that meaning anchors our lives. This is the rare work that will please everyone—scholars of Pynchon, readers of Vineland, adoring fans, and hardened skeptics—with gorgeous sentences that sparkle generously as they both describe and perform the best of what criticism is and can be.” —Jordan Alexander Stein, author of When Novels Were Books

“There’s no smarter or more generous guide than Peter Coviello to the experience of loving and living together with books and music. In this deft small volume, Coviello’s tender, gregarious mind returns to Vineland, Thomas Pynchon’s awkward middle child of a novel. He finds there exemplary lessons in how even our first, bad readings help people build a sustaining social world. And he explains why such intimate sodalities coexist with the deep ‘political grief’ caused by society’s submission to carceral capitalism.” —Matthew Hart, author of Extraterritorial: A Political Geography of Contemporary Fiction

Vineland Reread REREADINGS

REREADINGS EDITED BY NICHOLAS DAMES AND JENNY DAVIDSON

Short and accessible books by scholars, writers, and critics, each one revisiting a favorite post-1970 novel from the vantage point of the now. Taking a look at novels both celebrated and neglected, the series aims to display the full range of the possibilities of criticism, with books that experiment with form, voice, and method in an attempt to find different paths among scholarship, theory, and creative writing. A Visit from the Goon Squad Reread, Ivan Kreilkamp

Vineland REREAD

PETER COVIELLO

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

New York

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2020 Columbia University Press All rights reserved E-ISBN 978-0-231-54604-1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Coviello, Peter, author. Title: Vineland reread / Peter Coviello. Description: New York : Columbia University Press, [2020] | Series: Rereadings | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020026160 (print) | LCCN 2020026161 (ebook) | ISBN 9780231185202 (hardcover ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9780231185219 (trade paperback ; acidfree paper) Subjects: LCSH: Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. | Pynchon, Thomas—Criticism and interpretation. Classification: LCC PS3566.Y55 V56336 2020 (print) | LCC PS3566.Y55 (ebook) | DDC 813/.54—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026160 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020026161 A Columbia University Press E-book. CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [email protected]. Cover design: Julia Kushnirsky Cover illustration: Jessica W. Schwartz

CONTENTS

Prologue: Whatever’s Fair PART I 1. The Great South Coast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid (’94) 2. They Woke, the Thanatoids Awoke (’02) PART II 3. Scabland Garrison State (’08) 4. Secret Retributions (’19– …) Acknowledgments Notes Index

Prologue WHATEVER’S FAIR

W

hen I was young and stupid about books—when I was stupid about books the way teenagers are stupid about pop songs, the way new lovers are stupid in the spring—this thing happened to me once at an airport.1 This is a true story. It takes place, I am certain, in July of 1994, in one of the smaller gate areas at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport. I am reading a novel. And I am having an experience that will be familiar to anyone who has sat in the back of a lecture hall, a board meeting, a ballet recital—any sufficiently austere locale will do—and been overcome with wave after unstoppable wave of inappropriate hilarity. One of my students has a great phrase for this: the “church giggles,” he calls it. It’s when you know you mustn’t laugh but feel that the effort to restrain that laughter will cause such outrageous pressure to build up in your chest, at your temples, and behind your teeth that you will likely suffer some rupture, some ghastly internal implosion, and there you’ll be, inexplicably dead in the fourth pew. So there I am in this cramped gate, and the impatient fidgets and scowls of displeasure are almost universal among my few fellow travelers. And I am, as I say, reading a novel. I am working my way through this novel in which each successive sentence, and eventually each newturned clause, is striking me as funny in a way nothing in god’s green creation has ever been funny before, as just gaspingly, garishly, stupidly funny. And I’m sniffling and wheezing and willing my breath into yogic equanimity and basically doing everything in my mortal power to—as I keep telling myself—keep my shit together and not disrupt this funereal airport silence with some mortifying detonation of mirth. Whereupon, balanced on this razor’s edge of self-restraint, I read a passage, and land in fact on one word—it is the following proper name: Blodwen—and I’m done.2 Now, the phrase “explode with laughter” is in many respects an odd one, not least in its flirtation with the literal. In this case, though, it is entirely apt. For then and there, in successive bodylong convulsions, all that I had labored to contain burst grenade-like from me, and I surrendered to a fit of mad hilarity so wracking and complete that only when it had begun to subside did I notice a few of the following things: that tears were pouring in slick streams down my face; that my nose was running horribly; that, at about the volume of a barking dog, I had been hoarsely laughing, and was still; and that my fellow travelers, some of them in states of poorly concealed alarm, were inching sidelong away from me as far as the limited quarters would allow. I don’t know if any of you will have had the experience of exploding inappropriately in public like this. I can say that it was, for me, at once terribly shameful and completely exhilarating. And what I’m about to tell you truly did happen. As my gasping and hooting began to subside, this very kindly woman of probably about the age I am now approached me, put a gentle hand on my arm, and said, “Excuse me, what book are you reading?” And I snuffled, “Vineland, by Thomas Pynchon.” She straightened up and regarded me with a small even smile. “Well,” she said, “We’ve got a minute yet. I bet they’ve got a Waterstones somewhere in here.” And off she went.

Vineland is no one’s most beloved Pynchon novel; on a lot of days, it’s not even mine. Published in 1990, the first of Pynchon’s novels to appear after the Literary Event that was Gravity’s Rainbow, from 1973, it was soon enough eclipsed by the appearance just a few short years later of Mason & Dixon (1997) and has been held ever since in what might fairly be called middling esteem. This has shown some signs of shifting; the fact that some of its characters and family dynasties have themselves come to revivified life in later Pynchon works, like Against the Day and Vineland’s nearest companion, Inherent Vice, has made for some more generous recalibrations. Still, it is no one’s Gravity’s Rainbow and no one’s Mason & Dixon. None of this is especially unjust, and I promise you I’m not here to settle scores in these teacup debates. For the creation of a more just set of Pynchon listicles or for a Bloomian tabulation of aesthetic achievement, least to most, you will, alas, have to turn elsewhere. Yet it is genuinely striking: when it comes time to roll out those only half-unserious superlatives in which academic discourse often traffics in its off-hours —in conference anterooms, at dinner tables, at the bar—Vineland can find itself swiftly restored to a place of high prominence. The Greatest Post-Noir California Fiction; Greatest American Novel About the Sixties (which is perhaps only to say, the one Least Asphyxiated by Boomer Nostalgia); Best In-Novel Punk Rock Band Name (“Billy Barf and the Vomitones”); or, why not, Funniest Novel in English; and so on. I myself, with little enough provocation, might make a case for any of these designations—and, over many years and in the ramped-up talk proper to these less formal locales, possibly have. But why dissemble? Of course I have. Because the obdurate fact of the matter is that there probably is no single novel to which I’ve been more implacably devoted, through more seasons of life or across more varying atmospheres of spirit, than this one. I wish I could better explain it, but there it is. And so, for reasons more and less defensible, I have spent years now, years running on to decades, waylaying patient interlocutors with the contention that Vineland—slapstick, messy, unbeloved Vineland—is among the most abundant, generative, and farsighted of late-century American excursions into novelistic possibility, as rewarding to readerly scrutiny as it is humane and heartsick and (have I mentioned this?) spectacularly fucking funny. The book you are holding in your hands means to do some of this case making, with at least the pretense of a greater reasonability. And it means to do so a good deal of the time in the vernacular, agitated idioms in which some of these bygone disquistions originally took place. The reasons for this rhetorical angle of approach are many, and they should come clear over the course of these pages. I will say, by way of advance warning, that the aim here is not to be offhand or unscholarly. (Fair warning: though in the name of writerly hospitality I will keep academic dispute as much as possible to the notes, scholars—many of them—will speak up throughout the work of the book, theorists as well as literary critics.)3 Nor again do I mean to put in still more labor in the mines of Great Man mystification. I don’t know a better way to say it than that my governing hope is rather to evade as entirely as is possible a certain style of, let us say, asphyxiating appreciativeness in relation to Pynchon—or, at least, in relation to his genius, his exemplary postmodernity, as well as to his subversive obscurantism, his coded Illuminati intricacy, his winking conspiracist’s all-seeingness. You will not, in what follows, hear a lot about particle physics, aerospace engineering, Boolean circuits, Mitteleuropean mysticism, the Dark Web. I will not be speaking of “entropy,” I swear. Not any least bit of this is meant as a knock on Pynchon or his stories and novels. The matter has to do, much more pressingly, with what I have elsewhere called “that obscuring cloud of unjoyous, exalting, ‘serious’ appraisal—call it, for short, male—that has gathered around Pynchon and his works since the ’70s.”4 If you don’t know what I mean by this, my blessings upon you. But I know a lot of people—dear, trusted, in the main quite generous-hearted people—who have been sufficiently alienated by this kind of talk to want little to do with it or with the author who occasions it. My hope is not really to dissuade these readers, however much I incline to think of the work of this book as a kind of counterweight to—and, to the questionable degree it can be, apology for—that style of dudeish hyperdelectation. The unpersuaded have the ongoing right to their

position, god knows. As Pynchon himself puts it, in a disarming introduction to a volume of his collected juvenilia: “Whatever’s fair.”5 In regard to the many inflections of indifference to Pynchon, this has been, more or less, my guiding premise. Nevertheless, I do mean to make as compelling a case as I can for a Pynchon who might speak to us at other registers and in other, more companionable idioms. We needn’t sequester his novels from scholarly scrutiny to make this possible, and even less from the terrain of historical and political collision to which his work is so singularly attuned. This, too, should become abundantly clear as the arguments of this book unfold and accrue. But I do think it is worth saying up front and plainly: my initial, annealing experience of Pynchon, whatever else it may have been compounded with, was one of an immediate, jolting, and formidable joyousness. I had never before read anything like Vineland, anything so funny or so filled with an anarchic sense of possibility expanding in dizzying breadth from the page—and this, for me, then, was a lot of kinds of exhilarating. Of course, no grownup would mistake that kind of dazzled, adrenal reception for an unerring standard. Exhilaration and hilarity are quite as likely to make you stupid as not, as anybody who has ever embarked upon a disastrous affair can quite readily tell you. This is not any less true of literary criticism. And yet and yet. The book you are holding proceeds in the conviction that neither is such joyousness a dispensable element in the work of Thomas Pynchon—no more or less so than his dense historical referentiality, his careerwide antifascism—and that we do a poor kind of justice in our appraisals when we dissemble or diminish it. And anyway, who would want to write about Pynchon other than joyously? What could be less in the spirit of the work than the presumption that seriousness—critical, political, whathaveyou—requires a forensic excision of, for instance, silliness? Here is an exemplary offhand moment, which comes early on in Vineland and gives you some sense of its narrative disposition: A waitress approached with the check. Both men—Hector by reflex and Zoyd then startled into it—sprang toward her and collided, and the girl, alarmed, backed away, dropping the document, which then got batted around by the three parties until at last fluttering into a revolving condiment tray, where it ended up half submerged in a big fluffy mound of mayonnaise gone translucent at the edges. “Check’s in the mayo,” Zoyd had time to note, when all at once …

(32) It may be the case, discerning reader, that you do not share with the author quite as unapologizing a reverence for Three Stooges movies, Road Runner cartoons, execrable puns. Final fair warning: the book you are reading has a real weakness for turns like this.

To preview a bit, then: In the book that follows, I want to make a handful of interwoven arguments about Vineland, that outlier of a novel that takes as its principal setting far-northern California in the midst of the Reaganite/Orwellian year of 1984—though it flashes back for extended sequences to the political tumult of the late sixties, to Blacklist-era Hollywood, to San Francisco during World War II, and the early-century heyday of the IWW. I want to do so by tracking the novel across four scenes of reading, marked out by year of encounter: 1994, 2002, 2008, and 2019 or thereabouts.6 Only part of what I hope to bring to some sort of reckoning, in these recurring scenes, is the way this minorish and messy work, committedly silly and in many respects something of a wreck, became the one book to which I was so clumsily, clingingly attached, the object to which I’d most return in moments of need or collapse—as if it were a familiar landscape or a pop song or any one of those things that, through some strange magic, keep you anchored for a moment to the world. And so a prevailing set of questions animates the work of the book’s early chapters: What is it in novels that keeps us, on the better days, attached to life? And what might criticism have to do, if anything at all, with that sustenance? The answers on offer in these chapters are more conjectural than definitive; they will turn again and again toward the processes by which our agitated responsiveness to an object gets translated into language and that language gets itself mixed up in turn with other people—sometimes with the people we love and whose love we nourish by endeavoring to fashion together these little arias of appraisal and dispute. The makingtogether, in language, of smallish word-drunk sodalities, of worlds aslant to the World: this, I will suggest, is one of the things, both minor and cherishable, that criticism might be said to specialize in. Vineland taught me as much, which is fitting, since that very process—the fabulation of fragile collectivities pitted against the forces that would capture them—is, it turns out, one of Pynchon’s enduring themes. But there is another sort of reckoning at stake in the book’s movement through time, and it is not only with the generous provision the novel makes for readings keyed to multiple scenes of less and less juvenile uptake. And this is different in tenor, an estimation played out in a set of readings that operate as a kind of counterweight to the bookwide investment in delight and its affordances. It was none other than Salman Rushdie who, in a glowing initial review for the New York Times Book Review, described Vineland as “that rarest of birds: a major political novel,” and part of what the sequence of readings staged here means to track is the strange graduated slowness—the belatedness, if you want to be high-theoretical about it—with which that assertion came to acquire the full breadth of its meaning and consequence.7 I don’t just mean how piteously slow I was in coming to adequate terms with what I would now say are the political stakes of the novel, though slow I was indeed. I mean something differently scaled and differently, you could say, historical. That the author of Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon is a historically minded novelist will startle no one. My chief contention in the latter sections of the book, and particularly across the longish sustained reading that appears in chapter 3, is that in its cross-stitched and centuryspanning historicism Vineland offers prescient inquiry into the political atmospherics of a long, long season of solidifying reaction: an era—swiftly concretizing in ’68, in full flower by ’84, and continuing to flourish in 1990 and beyond—in which the forces of the state would assemble themselves more and more entirely on the model of never-ending war, a ceaseless carceral counterinsurgency under whose purview “freedom” can only be located at the outer limits of some achieved, absolutized “security.” This, I will suggest, is the substance of Vineland’s canny prevision of the nineties it inaugurates—that same techno-optimist, Clintonite, liberalish nineties in which I and my friends and all my initial readings were very clumsily entangled. We can do worse, in other words, than to regard Vineland as an apt opening salvo for that period of conjoined liberalish ascent and capitalist ultrahegemony that we now prefer to call—sometimes a bit gauzily, it’s true—“neoliberalism.” I am less concerned to read Pynchon as a diagnostician of the neoliberal condition than I am in building up a critical vocabulary to grapple with the nature of his style of response. In these readings, then, the novel comes into focus as a meditation on a century of America atrocity, with an especially keen eye on the conjoined forces of securitization—militarized policing, DEA hysteria, culturally mediated rescriptings of safety as happiness, security as justice—that would shape so definitively imaginings of later-century American national life. But those imaginings are also, for Pynchon, problems of history and, we could say, historiography: of which histories we can tell and which become lost to us. Vineland, as we shall see, spends a good deal of its time giving heft and texture to a world grounded in and made present to itself through a committed and insurrectionary militancy: this, in real ways, is the novel’s milieu. It does so, I will contend, as part of its counterhistorical effort to outflank what it understands to be a brutally amnesiac disposition of the political—name it “neoliberalism” or don’t—in the hope of capturing something of a scene of vibrant possibility and, more than this, an entire lived world, as it vanishes from the horizon of conceivability. It is in these senses that I will contend that Vineland—uproarious and joy-propounding Vineland—is, also, an extraordinary novel of political grief.

One final note, before getting underway. As I write, Thomas Pynchon is eighty-two years old. It is my very dear hope that he has a few more novels in him yet—another Inherent Vice or, who can say, another Against the Day—though I well recognize that this is, perhaps, wishful. But then, a lot of thinking about futurity feels wishful right now. If you’re at all like me, there’s an experience I imagine you know. It’s when you find yourself dropped for a moment into a kind of blinked-out wordlessness by the swift, inrushing force of some ordinary object or other, a song, a painting, an old and possibly over-familiar novel. You can,

I think, find yourself startled by the quality of gratitude that comes flooding through you in the wake of such moments. It is an odd sort of sensation: there’s pleasure in it, and a warming sort of surprise. But there is also this lingering sense of an indebtedness, incurred mostly in units of delight, that you haven’t in the moment an entirely clear sense how best to discharge. If you’re the kind of person who would take up a book like this, I’m betting you know at least something of what I mean. One way to think of the book before you is as the autobiography of an encounter with a particular novel, over a particular stretch of history. Another is as an accumulating estimation of the force of political and specifically historiographic critique that novel delivers as it surveys the seasons of insurrection and reaction that convulse the late twentieth century and reach into our own. Still another, though, is as something a little more mundane and maybe a little more discreditable: as, say, a fan’s notes, offered in the key of vernacular exposition, by a person to whom the book has given far, far more than he had any right to expect of anyone or anything, really, but especially of a discounted paperback picked up at a storefront bookshop on the north side of Chicago some time in the early nineties. That’s not all I take this book to be, not by a wide margin, but it certainly is part of it. Think of it perhaps as just a small giving of thanks, offered up here while the giving, such as it is, is good.

Part I So much nobler and more rapacious than his country cousins, bliss, elation, glee … while joy is singular, present tense, predatory, priapic, paradoxically composed of sorrow and terror as ice is made of water, dense and pure, darkly bejeweled, music rather than poetry, preliterate, lapidary, dumb as an ox, cruel as youth, magnificent and remorseless as Chicago in winter. —Campbell McGrath, from “The Golden Angel Pancake House”

1 THE GREAT SOUTH COAST PLAZA EYESHADOW RAID (’94)

V

ineland is Thomas Pynchon’s first post–Gravity’s Rainbow novel, released in 1990 and regarded, since then, as a fair-to-middling curiosity. (“That’s the one about … the communes?” a friend recently offered, after asking me what I was working on. And then, scanning the middle distance as if for a misplaced recollection, “With, like, a Godzilla appearance?”) The novel was to be further eclipsed, in 1997, by the appearance of the substantially more celebrated epic Mason & Dixon, although, at present, something of a small-bore reversal of critical fortune seems to be unfolding. The family at the center of Pynchon’s subsequent epic, Against the Day, from 2006, is the Traverses, who make their first sustained appearance in Vineland; then, too, his wonderful noirish Inherent Vice, from 2009, would take up not only some of the characters introduced in Vineland (Sledge Poteet, Scott Oof) but also the whole demimonde of Southern Californian counterculture as it turns the grim corner of 1970. All of this accumulating work has provided occasion to consider anew just what Pynchon had been up to back in 1990, when Vineland made its puzzling advent. Today, it is the kind of novel that scholars “revisit” and “reappraise.” Which, I think, tells you about as much as you need to know about its equivocal critical standing.1 What, then, is Vineland? The plot of the novel is too baroque to be summarized, but let’s try. You might say, if you were trying to be quick about it, that Vineland tells the history of twentieth-century American political life through the story of late-twentieth-century California. The novel takes place in north California—the logging, pot-harvesting, fog-bound California, up near real places like Arcata and Eureka—in the ominous high Reaganite summer of 1984, journeying back for extended passages to the late sixties and early seventies and wending briefly as well through other scenes of political promise, fracture, turbulence: from the heyday of the organizing and subsequent violent suppression of the International Workers of the World in the teens, to mobilized San Francisco during World War II, and out into Hollywood in the era of the blacklist. Across these and other locales, the novel traces the intersecting lives of Zoyd Wheeler, a postcounterculture doper, knockabout, day laborer, part-time rock-’n’-roller, and single dad; the fourteen-year-old Prairie, Zoyd’s tough and venturesome daughter from his brief marriage to the cynosural figure of the novel, Frenesi Gates, a child of blacklisted parents, grandchild of Wobblies, and one-time member of a radical film collective centered in Berkeley in the late sixties who abandoned Zoyd and Prairie long ago for one Brock Vond, an archvillainous prosecutor in the Department of Justice whom Frenesi had been unable to prevent herself from falling for (and later snitching for), much to the heartsick dismay of her then-partner in revolutionary action, Darryl Louise (DL) Chastain, a Texas girl who grew up a military brat in Japan and there, in her reckless teenage years, found herself sucked into an underground dojo world where she apprenticed as a kind of black-ops martial-arts prodigy, coming later to order her life around the venerable principle of “enlightenment through asskicking” (198) and to take up with Takeshi Fumimota, a Yakuza-adjacent fixer with whom, after mistakenly attempting to assassinate him, she starts a private detective agency specializing in karmic adjustment. Got it? A cast of secondary characters (the automobile resurrectionists Vato and Blood, the mathematician and would-be campus revolutionary Weed Atman, Ortho Bob the Thanatoid, the DEA field agent Hector Zuñiga) round out the dramatis personae. The action of the book is set into motion when, after more than a decade during which Zoyd and Prairie have hidden away in north California and Frenesi has worked increasingly desultory and glamourless gigs as a government sting operative, the compact they had all tacitly agreed to shortly after Prairie’s birth seems, all of a sudden, to collapse. This is because Brock Vond, orbiting somewhere in the upper echelons of American administrative policing power, appears to have decided all bygone bets are off, what with Reagan in the White House, the long-time hippie despiser Ed Meese seated at his right hand, and the time therefore maximally propitious for the once-and-for-all rounding up of whatever subversive elements remain. Will the prosecutor for Justice, riding down the strong currents of antidrug fervor and flag-waving Reaganism, succeed at last in bringing each and every former radical to rough and escalatingly fascoid American justice? Will the unquiet dead rise again in vengeance or achieve some peace-granting karmic restitution? Will Prairie meet her mom? Who will play whom in the Movie-of-the-Week? Such are the novel’s basic coordinates, though lost in this recitation is among other things the singular tone or collections of tones in which it is performed. I’ve made it seem antic and maybe a shade cartoonish, and there is reason for that. But that’s not all the novel is, and to miss its sustained strains of mournfulness is to miss a lot. All at once wounded and rueful and shot through with stupefied gawping outrage—much of which leverages its manic comedy—Vineland is, you could say, a book about the hard afterlives of American revolutionary politics: about the ascent of Reaganite reaction, about the recurring and epochal shamelessness of law-and-order tyrants, and about the slender possibilities for safe haven, out in the interstices of sprawling American space, for renegades and castaways, the unmoneyed and unreconciled, whose visions of the Good Life square only very little, if at all, with the state-sanctioned American Real. Sweet and bumblingly parental Zoyd, with his Zappa aspect and his unhealed heartbreak, is only one face the novel gives to the ranks of those making their way through the Orwellian days. And the quasi-mythical place called “Vineland”—“Vineland the Good,” Zoyd allows himself to think late in the book, reminding us of the provenance of the phrase “Vinland the Good” in the Old Norse sagas of the discovery of America2—is only one of those zones of partial refuge. But I’m getting way, way ahead of myself. Well might you wonder what any of this had to do with me, a young man in an airport, in that longago Clintonite summer of 1994, where our story begins. The truthful answer is: not that much.

I was reading the book that day in O’Hare, as for many years I would continue to do, for no good professional or scholarly reason. I was then in my opening years of graduate school, and my interests were lurching, in confused spasms of attention, between twentieth-century poetry, queer theory, and some profoundly underthought fascination with visions of national belonging in the literature of antebellum America. But even graduate students sometimes manage intellectual lives that exceed the bounded precincts of the institution. And so I had spent the previous weeks sojourning in Chicago with friends from whom I’d too long been separated, and there we had improved the time in the postcollegiate fashion: staying out late in and around the 5200 block of Clark Street, chasing the more inexpensive varieties of insobriety, perturbing the summer night with vehement and intricate disputation. This was John, and Laura, and Paul, and Enrique—although, my love for these precise people notwithstanding, you could I’m sure slot in any number of names and probably not lose much of significance with respect to the workings of this microcollectivity of young persons. I think a lot, in this vein, of a great passage from Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, about a character named Clara’s swoony first great love, for a scooter-loving wannabe Mod called Ryan: [Clara] imagined herself holding the bleeding Ryan in her arms, hearing him finally declare his undying love; she saw herself as Mod Widow, wearing black turtlenecks for a year and demanding “Waterloo Sunset” be played at his funeral. Clara’s inexplicable devotion to Ryan Topps knew no bounds. It transcended his bad looks, tedious personality, and unsightly personal habits. Essentially, it transcended Ryan, for … Clara was a teenage girl like any other; the object of her passion was only an accessory to the passion itself, a passion that through its long suppression was now asserting itself

with volcanic necessity. Over the ensuing months, Clara’s mind changed, Clara’s clothes changed, Clara’s walk changed, Clara’s soul changed. All over the world girls were calling this change Donny Osmond or Michael Jackson or the Bay City Rollers. Clara chose to call it Ryan Topps.3

A “teenage girl like any other,” we are told of Clara, and I assure you those handfuls of us in Chicago were every bit as unexceptional: just an ultraordinary collection of young people, mixed by upbringing and geography and much else but steered into sodality—homogeneity, you might less generously say—by collegiate lives that had staged for each us how startling, indeed how life enlarging, you might find the encounter even with something as anodyne as, for example, an idea. As you perhaps recall, it is a discovery of considerably gravity. All at once, the world seems to shimmer with mystery and possibility. Vineland is the name we were just then giving to the impulse to be in that new-dawning world, ardently and together. I’d arrived that summer among these dear people and very quickly discovered that they had been passing the novel around between them like some newfound intoxicant everybody needed a hit off of. There was with respect to Vineland a fervor, a density of impassioned investment, the likes of which were in those days usually reserved for bands and records. But with Pynchon (as Henry James wonderfully puts it) contradiction grew young, and with it came all the intimate delights of that special subcategory of sociality. Paul and Laura, if I remember correctly, had come to the book through Rique, and so particularly loved the passages that discussed “the Vibrating Palm,” an esoterica martial arts move that, once applied to the unsuspecting victim, would cause him to drop inexplicably dead approximately one year later. (“In the Dim Mak method, the Needle Finger DL intended to use could be calibrated to cause a delay of up to a year in the actual moment of death, depending on the force and direction of its application. She could hit Brock Vond now, and months in the future be safely in the middle of a perfect alibi the moment he dropped dead” [151].) John expressed preference for both the politics and the execution of the scene in which Zoyd, finally framed beyond escape by Brock Vond and his DEA stooges, returns with baby Prairie to his Hermosa Beach bungalow to find “the biggest block of pressed marijuana Zoyd had ever seen in his life, too big to have fit through any door yet towering there, mysteriously, a shaggy monolithic slab reaching almost to the ceiling” (294). (Being hauled away in cuffs, Zoyd is “led out through an audience of neighbors mostly staring in wonder, or in forms of mental distress such as fear, at the tall prism, now miraculously outside again, secured on a flatbed trailer, ready to be hauled back to whatever spacious Museum of Drug Abuse it had been borrowed from” [297].) I was to be a partisan of all scenes involving the lawn-care operation founded by “a reader of forbidden books” and so called The Marquis de Sod (46). We were young. It was talk like that. Why did we sustain these hours-long colloquies, kicking around ever-finer and more and more seemingly pointless distinctions? Why the counterfactual vehemence, immoderate opining, delight ratifying itself in dispute? The only partial answer is that we loved the book with the special force young people bring to the objects, not all of them inanimate, of their affection; that we were captivated by it—most forcefully by its comedy—in ways that made it seem as alive and as immediate to us as any song on the radio or record on the turntable. Why this book particularly? The reasons, so far as I can now surmise, were predictably juvenile. We loved its affection for the hapless but ineradicable decency of miscreants like Zoyd. We loved its stoner absurdism. We were flattered, bright children that we were, by its inanely recondite lore. (As in: “Fortunately, Ralph Wayvone’s library happened to include a copy of the indispensable Italian Wedding Fakebook, by Deleuze & Guattari, which Gelsomina, the bride, to protect her wedding from such possible unlucky omens as blood on the wedding cake, had the presence of mind to slip indoors and bring back out to Billy Barf’s attention” [97].) None of us could get enough of the sense of expansion and unconstraint, of an antic and ungovernable imaginative energy, that uncoiled page after page in sentences both riotously demotic and, in their syntactical unspooling, ornate, positively Jamesian, in ways we could never, in subsequent letters back and forth, manage to imitate quite successfully. We loved unto death the madcap, in-joking, word-by-word assembly of scenes like this, right down to its note-perfect punchline: This was [Prairie and Ché’s] star-and-sidekick routine, going back to when they were little, playing Bionic, Police, and Wonder Woman. A teacher had told Prairie’s class once to write a paragraph on what sports figure they wished they could be. Most girls said something like Chris Evert. Prairie said Brent Musberger. Each time they got together, it suited her to be the one to frame and comment on Ché’s roughhouse engagements with the world, though more than once she’d been called on for muscle, notably during the Great South Coast Plaza Eyeshadow Raid, still being talked about in tones of wounded bewilderment at security seminars nationwide, in which two dozen girls, in black T-shirts and jeans, carrying empty backpacks and riding on roller skates, perfectly acquainted with every inch of the terrain, had come precision whirring and ticking into the giant Plaza just before closing time and departed only moments later with the packs stuffed full of eyeshadows, mascaras, lipsticks, earrings, barrettes, bracelets, pantyhose, and fashion shades, all of which they had turned immediately for cash from an older person named Otis, with a panel truck headed for a swap meet far away. In the lucid high density of action, Prairie saw her friend about to be cornered, between a mall cop and a kid in a plastic smock, hardly older than they were, bought into it young, hollering as if it were his own stuff—with the cop, clear as a movie close-up, unsnapping his holster, oo-ooo, look out —“Ché!” Kicking up as much speed as she could, she went zooming in, screaming herself semidemented, paralyzing the pursuit long enough to sail alongside Ché, take her by the wrist, twirl her till they were aimed the right direction, and get rolling with her the hell out of there. It felt like being bionically speeded up, like Jamie Sommers, barreling through a field of slo-mo opposition, while all through this the background shopping music continued, perky and up-tempo, originally rock and roll but here reformatted into unthreatening wimped-out effluent, tranquilizing onlookers into thinking the juvenile snatch-and-grab mission couldn’t have been what it looked like, so it must be all right to return to closing time, what a relief. The tune coming out of the speakers as the girls all dispersed into the evening happened to be a sprightly oboe-and-string rendition of Chuck Berry’s “Maybellene.”

(327–28) Who could resist this? Here was a narrative voice entirely on the side of thieving and delinquency, of kids Robin Hood–ing through the copclogged spaces of the American marketplace, and announcing itself with an anarchic delightedness we then associated less with Serious Literature than with the spirit-shaking heresies of punk rock. (An older person named Otis? Jamie Sommers, the Bionic Woman? A sprightly oboe-and-string rendition of Chuck Berry? Come the fuck on.) Take that disposition and scale it up, so that it encompasses the fractious political life of twentieth-century America and its multiple seizures by reaction and counterrevolution, and you get some decent sense of the narrative atmosphere of Vineland. What was not to love? I would like to think something in us also responded to the writing itself, at levels more and less local. This surely is forgiving retrospect talking, but I would like to think we were live-minded enough even then to have noticed—beyond the wondrous antiestablishment flourishes, beyond the gleeful loathing of institutionalized authority, the polymath referentiality, the deadpan recitation of a history of American domestic atrocity—the novel’s positive reverence for the richness and splendid variety of ordinary American speech. (I hope we noticed too its attentiveness to what Pynchon, again in his in propria persona introduction to Slow Learner, calls “American nonverbal reality.”)4 Part of Pynchon’s signature as a stylist, I was just then beginning to discover, involves the conjoining of a fantastically baroque syntax with a giddy pleasure in the colloquial, in the possibilities of the vulgate, as unrestrained as most any you’ll find in American fiction after Twain and every bit as finely tuned. (See, again, the spectacularly hypotactic sentence beginning “Each time” and coming to rest in the perfectly demotic phrase “a panel truck headed for a swap meet.”) His style, in other words, performs the ongoing wedding of the elegant to the profane, James to Twain, high gentility to the vigorously antigenteel. I’d come upon a sentence later, in the infamous “Revenger’s Tragedy” section of The Crying of Lot 49, that never failed to reduce me to idiot hiccupping laughter, even after this special combinatory formula had become clear to me. “Honest Niccolo,” it goes, “who always has difficulty hiding his feelings, observes that if the two events turn out to be at all connected, and can be traced to Duke Angelo, boy, the Duke better watch out, is all.”5 Writing like this, dissolving as it did with such high delight the forms of order proper to what we understood to be Legitimate Novelistic Construction, felt to us I think like the seizing of a kind of freedom. I’m sorry to say that, with respect to the other things there were to notice about the novel—for instance, its attentiveness to experiences of genuine human grief, of losses impossible to compensate, dread encroaching and escalating, of smothered outrage and heartsick disbelief—we acquitted ourselves rather less well. This is not much of a surprise, though it is disheartening. Because what, then, had we to say about the iterations of sorrow that ballast the novel’s sometimes cartoonish humor and render its depiction of a lost moment of great promise and belief, of a “joyous certainty” now dissipated beyond hope of revivification, something substantially more wrought and harrowed than the standard-issue

boomer nostalgia we had even back then had more than enough of? Prairie, our nearest peer in the novel, spends part of the summer of 1984 watching old film reels, shot by her vanished mother, depicting “a night wingding that was supposed to be a general policy meeting” in the midst of a campus uprising. Led Zeppelin music blasted from the PA, bottles and joints circulated, one or two couples—it was hard to see—had found some space and started fucking. Up on the platform several people were screaming politics all at the same time, with constant input from the floor. Some wanted to declare war on the Nixon Regime, others to approach it, like any other municipality, on the topic of revenue sharing. Even through the crude old color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen anything like it before.

(209–10) I can’t say if any of us paused over that last phrase—Prairie, as I say, is born in 1970, near to most of us—but I do know this is true: neither had we. As I say, though, as accounts of why we loved this book all of these explanations are, at best, partial. As has been the case with virtually all of the books and songs and records I have come to cherish, whatever delight I took in Vineland would be hard to separate from the delights taken by that mini-grouping in one another’s company, or from the intimacies the book both entered into and, by its special grace, sustained. So much of the joy of reading Vineland that day in the airport, and in subsequent readings, came from the vivifying sense I had of collusion. I am thinking of the thrilling, conspiratorial sense of finding in the pleasures of works themselves a testament to the densely layered histories (of pleasure and affection and dispute) that had brought them, in the first place, into your hands. A critic named Karen Tongson, in a phrase I have long adored, invites us to think of pop radio as “a technology of remote intimacy,” and it’s startling to consider how novels, too, can fulfill this very office.6 Vineland, for us, just then, certainly did. And it taught me an astounding amount about just how happy you might be made, how transported by a particular calibration of joy, through the simple act of participating in the talk that condenses around the objects people love most. It seems obvious now, and maybe you didn’t need this kind of woozy and bar-lit ritualizing to come to it, but I swear nothing made clearer to me that this is what friends do, that this is how friends come to love one another and to nourish that love: by figuring out how to talk together about the things in the world that most beguile or intrigue or captivate them. I would remember, then, a line from Faulkner, in which he calls this “the best of all talking,” and that was it precisely. For here we were, a group of young people just beginning to glimpse the wider ballasting delights that, once removed from institutional settings like the classroom, insubstantial things like books might be discovered to possess. I grant you that there are probably easier ways to grasp the plain fact that falling in love with people is a process deeply involved in the making together of a language—an idiolect of veneration and disparagement, of criticism infused with joy—that you might then spend years refining and revising and speaking back to one another. This is how it happened for me, though. All of this is, as I say, standard issue, and if you are a reader of a book like this it seems to me unlikely in the extreme that nothing of the above will have an analogue, adjusted for era and for object, somewhere in your own experience. For you and yours it may not have been Vineland, the latest Helium EP, Clifford Brown. Maybe it was Middlemarch, or Another Country, or Joni Mitchell, or, I don’t know, The Mists of fucking Avalon. They all make a wonderful provision for ardor. They’re all effective if what you are doing is teaching yourselves how to convene what you might, with only a bit of aggrandizement, call a world: a collectivity of fellow travelers—a “peer group,” as the killjoy social scientists say—who out of the sheer abundance of their enthusiasm find themselves fabulating these semiprivate codes and idiolects, scored by distinctions and disputes and polemics and energized by the unbounded force of love that young people specialize in carrying to the scenes of their devotion. Nothing ever quite brought home to me the lit-up inner magic of such exchanges, or of the joys of this sort of small-bore worldmaking, as much as Vineland did. One result of which was that every subsequent rereading returned me, with a tranced and intoxicating completeness, to Paul, to Laura, to the whole scene of our being together. I don’t know that I ever got over it.

It’d be easy to feel embarrassed by episodes like this, given their self-pleased insularity, their tediousness, their total demographic predictability. Listen: I know. If I’m less mortified by them than perhaps I should be, it is not because I suspect the scenes of sociability at their center to be hives of insurrectionary foment, or subversiveness, or really anything other than the finally commonplace. It is not a matter of nostalgic loyalty, or not only. But I do take them to be weirdly suggestive, weirdly instructive little ensembles. And they are so, I want to suggest, because they offer us one model of a kind of collectivity at the very heart of which is something very like criticism—by which I mean nothing more august than the making and honing of languages of appreciation, discrimination, and critique. We might go so far as to venture that they model, after their fashion, a kind of public, even if not in the Deweyian, or Arendtian, or Nancy-inflected senses.7 To do so we need only take “public” to signify, in a rather more basic construction, a network of relations, of attachments and affective ties, conjoining a set of persons and orienting them toward the world. By these lights, these scenes of sociability do indeed constitute a sort of public, insofar as they are collectivities drawn together by the impassioned responses of its members to an array of objects and given life by visceral and ongoing disagreements about not only the objects responded to but about the consequences of those passions, about the world those passions and the languages that emerge from them seem to imply. What goes on around creaky tables, in the corners of loud parties, at the backs of bars, and, when fortune smiles, in seminar rooms is “conversation,” yes. But it is conversation in a particular key. It is, I submit, a conversation in which one labors to translate one’s pleasures into worldviews, where the terminology is necessarily mutable, and where the larger ambition, if there is just one, is to fashion collaboratively an ever more refined vocabulary to describe one’s relation to the world and its vocabularies, its demands and injustices and exclusions and authorities. I think, at these angles, less of Dewey or Arendt than of a writer like Emerson. This is the Emerson who warned with such vehemence not so much against what gets rather blandly figured as “conformity” as against what we might rather call a certain frightening greed for consensus: for a mutual legibility that allows us to transact smoother and smoother business with one another. The matter for Emerson was not that a vigorous democratic public sphere could not sustain a potentially infinite number of conversations about what the nature of the collective good actually is or might be. The problem, instead, was that any such conversation would, of necessity, depend upon a prior consensus as to what shall count as conversation, what terms shall be admissible, what languages or perspectives or persons shall be considered sufficiently plausible or decorous or rational to take part. The very notion of conversation, Emerson is always reminding us, presupposes an agreed-upon bottom line of mutually intelligible terms. Though there is in this simple fact nothing innately sinister, Emerson would nevertheless persistently foreground how swiftly those agreed-upon anchoring terms can calcify, can in the shadows of public life conspire to form an unspoken and uninterrogated kind of consensus that is itself inflexible, exclusionary, and sometimes brutal. Though no one has ever mistaken her for much of an Emersonian, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick would adduce exactly these styles of consensus in what she names “the brutality of a society’s big and tiny decisions, implicit and encoded ones, about which lives have and have not value.”8 The great alarm for Emerson was thus that in our hurry to agree upon the terms we might use in conversation with ourselves—a hurry born of the needs of commerce, “the affairs of our pot and kettle” that turn the “grand cipher” of language into a mere “municipal speech”—there would follow a great and debilitating calcification of our view of the world, a terrible stifling of emergences and possibilities.9 Our language, in the Emersonian idiom, would cease to move at the speed of nature, with its rapid evolutions and ceaseless unfoldings. (“What we call nature,” he writes in “The Poet,” “is a certain self-regulated motion, or change.”)10 Hence his high estimation of poetry and of the role of the poet. For poetry, as Emerson thinks of it, is and is not the world’s language: it borrows from that language, certainly, but by invention or inspiration or sheer grammatical violence, poetry mutates it, renovates it, makes it strange to itself, and new. Most crucially, poetry takes as a given the fact that the world is glutted with covert agreements about whose perspectives, whose languages, whose lives “have and have not value,” as Sedgwick puts

it, and it seeks to put those agreements back into play, back into the field of open contestation. When we read the work of the poet, Emerson writes, “metamorphosis is possible”: “He unlocks our chains, and admits us to a new scene.”11 One thing to notice in this strand of Emerson, and I think to admire, is the way he figures language not at all unskeptically—it can too easily devolve into “municipal speech”—but still as something other than simply the enemy of the expansiveness, dynamism, and freedom from mystification we might want. Poetry, after all, is not, or is not only, language’s antithesis: it does not escape the conditions of language’s nonself-presence, say, but that nonescape is for him hardly the end of the story. In Emerson’s view of poetry, that is, we hear the beginnings of a case being made for the uses, the unsung affordances, of articulacy. And this returns us to what I have been describing as the chief industry of those special scenes of fractious sociability—and that, again, is the transforming of ardor into a species of language, into peculiar, semilegible, semiprivate idiolects, prompted by particular objects but wired immediately back into the circuit of intimacies those objects help sustain and amplify, in recursive series, for as long as you can read, listen, talk, write. The covert prediscursive assignments of value and legibility, which both Emerson and Sedgwick invoke: precisely there, I think, are the forms of consensus, the subterranean agreements, the conspiracies of the empowered, that such vehement micropublics speak up volubly against. For that special sort of public, as I have tried to define it—with its unyieldingly idiosyncratic languages and pleasures—has designs on the greater public world; that world and the languages that encode its official reality are ever the target of its deliberations. But such publics refuse to speak only in that world’s accepted language. They make this refusal not to render themselves obscure or inconsequential but to erode forever the unspoken agreements and specious assignments of value that operate covertly in public life. Precisely in their combative idiosyncrasy, their resistance to legibility, these scenes can be said to work toward what Emerson sees as the indispensable task of keeping public speech alive, of keeping it elastic and agile and open to new horizons of possibility. And listen, I get the counterclaim, I do. You need not specialize in Bourdieu to know full well that in certain precincts of the mercilessly capitalized world the choice of objects on which to bestow one’s devotion, particularly aesthetic objects, can function in essence as a strategy of distinction, a way to insist upon one’s own exalted place in a social hierarchy whose material ungroundedness—whose evanescence and immateriality—does nothing to diminish its viciousness. (Many a contemporary arraignment of the hipster and of the urban plague of his skinnyjeaned brethren falls out in exactly these terms, as you will not have failed to notice.) One might grant all this and still be unpersuaded by the totality of this style of critique. Put it like this: when I see hipster kids in some club or coffee shop or bar, bedecked in the accoutrements of one emerging microtrend or other, I do not, I confess, experience so immediate and blinding an access of rage that I am forced to reach, gunslingerlike, for my copy of Distinction. Perhaps indefensibly, what I see are kids who love things and who are using what languages are at their disposal (sartorial, affective, sometimes steeply monetized and sometimes not) to give that love some kind of heft and shape and articulacy. Those languages aren’t typically my languages—like most of my friends I prefer complex syntax and bar fighting: this is why we are friends—but I don’t dismiss out of hand the latent acuities of their love, whatever its object and whatever its mode and however swiftly their styles might be churned into the capitalized stuff of hegemonic commodity culture. Now is perhaps the time to add: Idiosyncratic sodalities and their vulnerability to seizure by authoritarian imperatives are, without question, one of Pynchon’s chief preoccupations as a novelist. We could think most obviously of the 24fps film collective in Vineland and its slow infiltration, via Frenesi, by its enemies in the state, but these scenes of counterpublic formation and reactionary capture are everywhere in Vineland, a novel that, as N. Katherine Hayles rightly observes, is obsessive in its fascination with smallish counterhegemonic collectivities.12 And they are everywhere in Pynchon more generally, ranging in form and shape from the Inamorata and the participants in W.A.S.T.E. in The Crying of Lot 49 out through the revolutionary cells that come together and fall apart in Against the Day—and this is to name only the most obvious among featured minisocialities that stretch all the way back to V. and “the whole sick crew.” All of them are semisecret groupings, bound into fleeting coherence by the codes of their togetherness and their devoted opposition to structuring powers local and expansive but ever in danger of captivation by those authorities. We will speak in great detail of many of these later. For the moment, you lose no points whatsoever for recognizing this as Pynchon’s abiding subject, his delight and his fear.

All of this is to suggest, then, that the value of the objects we cherish might reside not least in the ways they jolt us into (fractious, joyful) dispute. I submit that this value is public insofar as the ardor the object inspires is always looking to measure itself against another’s ardor, to mix itself up with other languages of apprehension. Trying to figure out why you love something as implacably as you do can be a lifelong endeavor, and it seems necessarily to involve other people. Or at least it has for me. Constituencies get formed; secret publics convene themselves around these objects for the purpose of what art critic Dave Hickey winningly calls “the street-level negotiation of value.”13 Of value: we come together around these objects not to praise or bury them but to debate the question of what we value, of what does or might please us, of what kind of world it is we would make our passion and our sorrow and our joy. Criticism, particularly under the guise of “theory,” has, I know, a range of other, grander purposes it likes to assign itself. But thinking about criticism this way may have its benefits. Listen to Christopher Nealon, himself a fine reader of Pynchon. In an article on post-Language poetry and the potential uses of the Frankfurt School, he writes both of the political potentiality of writing and against what he calls “a rote ‘problematization’ of texts”: “What if their political efficacy,” he asks, has been evacuated or is pending? Ascribing performative success to these objects—to pick one of our favorite strategies of the last decade—and equating that capacity for performance with agency doesn’t seem to do justice to the theoretical power of the idea of performativity, which I take to lie not in our applauding the aesthetic object’s performance but in our being unable to pin down when the performance is finished. Crucial to the sympathetic reading practice I want to advocate is an understanding that critical acts are not discrete. To dismiss appreciative or content-driven readings of texts on the grounds that they are insufficiently politicized, insufficiently counterhegemonic, is to mistake the work of countering hegemony (if that’s what we’re doing) as individual work. When I read a text that interests me, especially for its political-affective comportment, my impulse, my critical impulse, is: pass it on. Highlight it as best you can, read against the grain, or with it where you can, and make sure others take a look. This is as true for texts that I find repulsive as for those I admire: I don’t imagine myself, as a critic, judging by myself.14

Nor, I imagine, do most of us. Of course, in 1994, I did not have any of these words. Apprenticed though I was to the languages of theory that would do so much to reshape thought itself for me, I could not then have made a case for any of the exemplary aspects of these sociable little ensembles, or none beyond the intuition that they made me intensely fucking happy—that, in their conjoining of books and talk and love, they gave me a taste of something I wanted a great deal more of. I can do at least a little better these days, though. Now, I would say we were learning something about the possibilities for appraising responsiveness that did not abjure exposure, or deconstruction, or critique—these were aspirations, I think, as much as anything else—but would not quite be exhausted in them, and would be clarified as well by something nearer plenitude, to whatever was the reverse of lack. Back then I would’ve just called this happiness and let it go, so contented was I in those ordinary experiences of sociable enjoyment––those passages of sustained and gregarious delight—that at their richest scaled up the estimable heights of joy itself. This was not jouissance, that ecstatic dissolution of the self that confounds psychic and corporeal boundaries and, doing so, marks the limits of the Symbolic, the place where language dissolves. More quotidian and frankly undramatic, such happiness had its root rather in the making of language—and it still does. It is a thing made up of the talk that swirls around and between the people we love; it partakes of the lightness, that strange and happy intensity, that catches us now and again at tables, or in bars, or listening to songs we love, or even, sometimes (who can say?), in the classroom—that exhilarated happiness I suspect most of us know when it washes over us, miss when it’s gone, and hope by one measure or another to return to, be it via friends or drink or talk or any of their combinatory extensions. More accessible than justice (and indeed perhaps a too-ready substitute), more commandingly physical than contentment, more everyday than jouissance’s self-shattering, this subspecies of joy consists not least in a momentary inflooding sense of abundance, a richness of pleasure that amplifies itself in its sharing.

And the truth is, even by the time I got to Pynchon, I’d been looking for something like it. Maybe two or three years before arriving at Vineland I’d found my way to the writings of Lester Bangs, and there I discovered—though I didn’t get it at the time—one version of what such exchanges with an object might look like and how an account of them might go. With the example of the Clash before him, Bangs wrote, The politics of rock ’n’ roll, in England or America or anywhere else, is that a whole lot of kids want to be fried out of their skins by the most scalding propulsion they can find, for a night they can pretend is the rest of their lives, and whether the next day they go back to work in shops or boredom on the dole or American TV doldrums in Mom ’n’ Daddy’s living room nothing can cancel the reality of that night in the revivifying flames when for once if only then in your life you were blasted outside of yourself and the monotony which defines most life anywhere at any time, when you supped on lightning and nothing else in the realms of the living or dead mattered at all.15

If this wasn’t criticism, then criticism was maybe not a thing I wanted to do. And this is surely part of why I fell as implacably hard for Vineland as I did. For the novel knows exactly—but exactly—what these scenes of overheated dispute and counterfactual hypervehemence are all about. Witness Vineland’s account of a single exchange between Isiah TwoFour, Prairie’s teenaged punk-rock boyfriend, and Zoyd, the concluding sentence of which I had committed to memory bare moments after first reading it: “Hey, so, Mr. Wheeler,” Isaiah said at last, “how you doing?” “What’s this ‘Mr. Wheeler,’ what happened to ‘You lunch meat, ‘sucker’?” this line having climaxed their last get-together, when, from a temperate discussion of musical differences, feelings had escalated into the rejection, on a quite broad scale, of most of one another’s values.

(18) On a quite broad scale: here, as vividly as anywhere else in the novel, is the heartening and I would insist only half-ironized sense that what is up for grabs when we fight about what we love and why we love it is value: the terms through which we appraise the world and do our best to render it habitable, for ourselves and for others. And this is perhaps how, when I was still young enough for it to matter, Vineland implanted in me a twinned belief, first, in the understressed effectivities of articulacy, and second, in the nonnegligible force of happiness—“the least and best of human attainments,” as Frank O’Hara insists—as something other than necessarily fatuous, naïve, covertly retrograde, the opposite of outrage and therefore the emblem of a well-fed bourgeois complacency. The scenes of joyfulness Vineland convened for me may indeed have partaken of all these things and of the kinds of self-indulgence and self-delightedness for which the expropriating classes are known. That’s more than fair. But they spoke up in other voices as well. And then, they kept speaking.

2 THEY WOKE, THE THANATOIDS AWOKE (’02)

T

here is, in the middle of Vineland, a killing. Despite Pynchon’s warm affection for genre mash-up—in Vineland alone we find the organizing tropes of monster movies, folk tales, Westerns, marital arts adventures, intergenerational romance, sci-fi, and much else—the murder is not, alas, a part of any Christie-esque manor-house mystery. We know the victim (Weed Atman, mathematics professor and accidental campus radical at the College of the Surf), and we know the perpetrator (graduate student Rex Snuvvle), just as we know the motivating cause. It is this: Frenesi, at the instigation of her now-lover-in-secret Brock Vond, “had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed,” claiming Weed had confessed to her, during their affair, that he had been working all along at the behest of the Feds, helping them arrange a massive campus-clearing sting (237). Rex, a campus revolutionary who “had become obsessed with the fate of the Bolshevik Leninist Group of Vietnam, a section of the Fourth International that up till 1953 had trained in France and sent to Vietnam some 500 Trotskyist cadres, none of whom, being to the left of Ho Chi Minh, were ever heard from again”—this Rex, in a frenzy of paranoia and using the gun provided to him by Frenesi (and provided to her for the purpose by Brock), shoots Weed dead in a surfside California alley, in the pivotal year 1969, shortly before Brock’s COINTELPRO-funded army descends on the campus in full force to round up whichever of the scattering student dissidents they can lay hands on (207). Before all this transpires, though, there is a small tranced lull at the College of the Surf—which, incidentally, is no longer called the College of the Surf, the students having chosen “to secede from California and become a nation of their own, which following a tumultuous nightlong gettogether on the subject they decided to name, after the one constant they knew they could count on never to die, The People’s Republic of Rock and Roll” (209). In the midst of the uneasy quiet that precedes by just a moment or two the raids to come, Weed and Rex, increasingly at crosspurposes, share a long, last, midconversation look. And it is at precisely this point that the narrative, with some abruptness, pivots and for the space of a few sentences inhabits a curious, backward-looking subjunctive case. “Neither one,” we are told, could know how few and fortunate would be any who’d be able to meet in years later than these and smile, and relax beneath some low oak out on an impossible hillside, with sunlight, and the voices of children, “And we actually thought we were having it out over these points of doctrine,” as some fine-looking young teener appears now from nowhere with a picnic spread, as they all sit and eat cracked crab and sourdough bread and drink some chilly gold-green California Chenin Blanc, and laugh, and pour more wine, “really obscure arguments, typewriters rattling through the windows all over campus, all night long, phone lines humming, amazing amounts of energetic youthful running around, and all for what?”

(232) The Chenin Blanc, you could say, strikes the pure note of the scene. For here is a vision of serene Californian plenty, antagonisms resolved into self-deprecating retrospection, the past no more than a vivid if slightly melodramatic preface to the sunswept present tense. If this tidy evocation of bourgeois abundance tracks quite neatly with a certain yuppified style of boomer self-narration—a commonplace Big Chill–ish way of understanding the curious aberration that was the late sixties—Pynchon, we should note, wants none of it. Such blandly neutering nostalgia is available, the novel tells us, to the few and the fortunate, none of whom figure prominently in Vineland’s cast of characters. We need only think of what befalls these two men. Of Rex’s life, hereafter, we know nothing. Weed’s postdeath fate is, in the way of the novel, more interesting: murdered, soul-stunned by the betrayal, incurably fixated on the injustice done to him, he finds himself unable to advance into the condition of death and so joins the community of everyday ghosts who populate Vineland County, up in the vicinity of Shade Creek, especially densely. These are the Thanatoids, who, ontological weirdness aside, have an important role to play in the novel’s unfolding. Not that Weed and Rex have the least sense of any of these crossed destinies, speeding at them even then over the horizon of their lives. The passage just quoted stands also as a stark, you might even say Jamesian reminder of how little we can know of the fates we are bringing about, especially as we are thick in the business of doing so. You might imagine that the clarity of scenes like this—and, relatedly, of the pivotal role of state murder in the turning of the plot of the novel— would have chastened somewhat the impulse to regard Vineland as a slapstick comic romp. It did not, for me and mine, or not for a while. There is a swarm of reasons for this, of course. Some of them involve the blinkered college-kid obtuseness that had most of us wrapped in its voluptuous embrace even then. Others operate in relation to the (to us) puzzling flourishes with which the novel addresses itself to death, dying, and the dead. (Unfamiliar as I was with the Bardo, the concept of the Thanatoids did not make the easiest sort of sense to me.) But these are not the only ones. I’ve said that the book felt to us, a lot of the time, like a venturing out into a certain iteration of “freedom,” by which I suppose I just mean a page-by-page enlargement in the roster of thinkable things you might do with a novel, an episode, a passage, a sentence. I still think that’s right, not least because every hungry rereading of the novel thereafter, however swiftly it brought me back into the warming psychic company of friends no longer near to hand, staged yet another encounter with this vertiginous and half-hilarious sense of liftoff. And I am just loyal enough to that amateurish readerly smittenness to believe even still that readings that guard too conscientiously against any sort of contact with it, or with the sort of uncoiling expansiveness in which the novel traffics, run the risk of a particular species of distortion. (It is a kind of critical writing that threatens to devolve pretty quickly into “term papers and advertising,” as Dave Hickey somewhat meanly puts it.)1 You do well, where Pynchon is concerned, to resist the allure of a seriousness too quickly conceded to. To read in this way, though—with that kind undefended openness to the pleasures of, let’s say, ludic bewilderment—requires a certain calibration, a certain dialing of the aperture of attention. Vineland, I want now to suggest, offers an exemplary immersive training in just such susceptibilities. I pursue that suggestion here, as in the previous chapter, largely in the key of delight—although, as we shall see, that special attunement, like all calibrations of its sort, is ultimately no less a blocking out than it is a letting in, and what it is that gets blocked out will be of increasing consequence as we go on. Not that I was visited by any especially nagging sense, back then, that anything was being left out. Like Weed and Rex, whose gold-green Chenin Blanc would never be poured, I very much was not. How could I have been? Even on the best of your days, it’s hard to know what you don’t know. But then something happens, and, suddenly, you do.

In a strong recent account of Vineland, Henry Veggian offers an inquiry into the novel’s “combined gravity and levity” as a way to probe Pynchon’s vexed relation to “classical realism.”2 His reading of the novel’s “synthesis of styles and moods” is exemplary for the breadth of its attention not only to the political geography of the thing but to what I have been insisting is its all-pervading and absolutely definitive high comedy. In a deft riff on Georg Lukács, Veggian maps the novel’s arrangement of three essential blocs. His plotting is worth quoting at length:

There is … an “older” radical tradition, which, in the novel, comprises an aging hegemonic political generation of New Deal Democrats, syndicalists, fellow travelers, socialists, and communists. This group’s representative character is Sasha Gates, the daughter of IWW labor activists.… The second generation is composed of the first group’s progeny, the “flower power” counterculture of the 1960s, which includes pacifists, campus radicals, armed revolutionaries, and various artists. This group is represented primarily by Sasha Gates’s daughter Frenesi, a radical filmmaker, as well as by her former husband, Zoyd Wheeler. A third and rival group, aligned against the prior two, comprises a paranoid lot of post-McCarthy cultural conservatives. Brock Vond, a U.S. district attorney, represents this third group.… Having evacuated institutions (industry, government) of the older radical generation’s New Deal agents, the ascendant bloc realigns those institutions with private industrial interests that were allegedly threatened by federal New Deal policies. In the novel, those converted institutions have set their sights on the remnants of the younger radical generation.

(137) What results, in Veggian’s reading, is a novel “whose central political concern is what Rushdie described as ‘the slow (but not total) steamrollering of a radical tradition’ ” (140). He gives us an elegant summary framing: “Lukács might have called Vineland a novel in which a supergeneration of Romantic anticapitalists that is losing its grasp on economic and political institutions is depicted in a decadent yet hopeful postrevolutionary phase” (140).3 Veggian’s is a fine and, I think, clarifying cartography of the novel’s major factions, of their interrelation, and of the styles of political diagnosis the play between them encodes, and it is accomplished with a deftness of touch not all accounts of Pynchon’s politics manage to pull off. Still, I want to demur from one of the essay’s bet-hedging subtheses. This concerns, precisely, the relation between the novel’s comedy and what Veggian calls, with a small wink, its gravity. “Levity, irony, anachronism, and the absurd certainly course through Vineland,” he writes, “yet they are secondary to its grave ambition to incorporate them into a ‘major political novel’ ” (139–40). Hold up now, friend: secondary? This seems to me, in important and importantly distorting ways, a bit hasty. For evidence that there is nothing whatsoever subordinate about its antic comedy, one could after all take up any number of strains in the novel, located at levels from the granular to the macro. So for instance, with respect to the macro: Veggian’s reading does us the service of charting the novel’s political economy in terms of its narrative architecture, where the staged conflicts among political blocs align with, and complicatingly echo, those of classic French realism. Consider, then, in relation to this salutary mapping, another of the book’s proffered metastructures, this one somewhat more esoteric. Very early on, in the novel’s opening pages, Zoyd makes his way to an establishment called the Log Jam, in Del Norte. He has repaired there to perform the yearly act of public insanity—typically a jump through one or another local plate-glass window—that both guarantees his minimal government check and, per the deal he made long ago with Brock Vond, allows the state to confirm his whereabouts in perpetuity. But the Log Jam, this early afternoon, is not as Zoyd expects. “Wasn’t there supposed to be some loggers’ bar around here someplace?” he wonders. Dangerous men with coarsened attitudes, especially toward death, were perched around lightly on designer barstools, sipping kiwi mimosas. The jukebox once famous for hundreds of freeway exits up and down the coast for its gigantic country-and-western collection, including half a dozen covers of “So Lonesome I Could Cry,” was reformatted to light classical and New Age music that gently peeped at the edges of audibility, lulling this roomful of choppers and choker setters who now all looked like models in Father’s Day ads. One of the larger of these, being among the first to notice Zoyd, had chosen to deal with the situation. He wore sunglasses with stylish frames, a Turnbull & Asser shirt in some pastel plaid, three-figure-pricetag jeans by Mme. Gris, and après-logging shoes of a subdued, but incontestably blue, suede.

(5–6) What, the stunned Zoyd can only wonder, gives? Come to find out, the ghostly woods north of Vineland County have, by the summer of 1984, found themselves visited by a different species of magic, and not all of it supplied by Turnbull & Asser. “Well,” Buster the proprietor tells Zoyd, “we’re no longer as low-rent as people remember us here either Zoyd, in fact since George Lucas and all his crew came and went there’s been a real change of consciousness.” “They were talking about Return of the Jedi (1983),” the narrative explains, parts of which had been filmed in the area and in Buster’s view changed life there forever. He put his massive elbows on about the only thing in here that hadn’t been replaced, the original bar, carved back at the turn of the century from one giant redwood log. “But underneath, we’re still just country fellas.” “From the looks of your parking lot, the country must be Germany.”

(7) Well might you take this for but the first in the novel’s never-ending litany of thrown-off jokes, keyed to the flotsam of mass culture, its delectable titles and brand names, and to its more and more unyielding supersaturation of all available precincts of the lifeworld. Return of the Jedi has the distinction of being a film you might, if you wanted to, find and watch, making it different from the many conjured titles to come, such as “Pia Zadora in The Clara Bow Story” (14), “Sean Connery in The G. Gordon Liddy Story” (339), and (a real favorite) “Woody Allen in Young Kissinger” (309). But not so fast. This initial invocation, it proves, is different, and differently consequential. Some four hundred pages later, after all the century-spanning peregrinations we have noted and many we have not, the novel reaches its climactic moment. (Herewith: SPOILERS.) All the major players have gathered at the Traverse-Becker family reunion up in Vineland, and Prairie, having met her longed-for mother, retreats to a forest clearing to be alone with her thoughts and sleep off the tumult of the day. Whereupon: “The beat of helicopter blades directly overhead woke her. As she stared, down out of it, hooked by harness and cable to the mother ship above, came Brock Vond, who looked just like he had on film” (375). Here at last is the drawing together of the novel’s principal antagonists, the visionary of reaction set against the inheritor of a long tradition of radicalism, in a scene of telescopic compression. What could be of higher gravity? The encounter culminates, amazingly, thus: She lay paralyzed in her childhood sleeping bag with the duck decoys on the lining and saw that even in the shadows his skin glowed unusually white. For a second it seemed he might hold her in some serpent hypnosis. But she came fully awake and yelled in his face, “Get the fuck out of here!” “Hello, Prairie. You know who I am, don’t you? She pretended to find something in the bag. “This is a buck knife. If you don’t—” “But Prairie, I’m your father. Not Wheeler—me. Your real Dad.” Nothing that hadn’t occurred to her before—still, for half a second, she began to go hollow, before remembering who she was. “But you can’t be my father, Mr. Vond,” she objected, “my blood type is A. Yours is Preparation H.” By the time Brock figured out the complex insult, he was also feeling mixed signals through the cable that held him. Suddenly …

(376) Now, you do not have to be a child of the seventies and eighties to grasp the force of this exchange, though it probably helps. For in this moment of ripest political conflict, wherein the Lukácsian generations square off eye to eye and Prairie, “remembering who she was,” arrives at a culminating sense of her place in a lineage of antifascist defiance, we are treated to what must be among the most iconic utterances of the entire era: I’m your father, Brock Vond declares. The simplest of sentences, it also effectively recodes the novel at a stroke, lending it a narrative template at once alongside of and askance to those realist mappings. For these are, of course, none other than Darth Vader’s words to Luke Skywalker at the end of The Empire Strikes Back (1980), the sequel to which would go on to be filmed, as we know, there among the whispering redwoods of Vineland. If Vineland is an American updating of Balzac’s The Peasants—and let me say again with respect to Veggian: I have no problem accepting that it is—it is no less a retelling of the Star Wars trilogy, with all the Campbellesque mythography, allegorical personation (Brock Vader? Darth Vond?), and camp gravity that go along with it. It is a scene all at once momentous, consummating, oddly tenderhearted, and purely ridiculous.

“Funny thing about Georg Lukács,” I find myself wanting to say to Veggian. “In America it’s pronounced ‘George Lucas.’ ”

An interlude like the one above might on its own disincline us to stack up, in articulated hierarchy, the novel’s political-economic gravity and its much-indulged-in stoner daffiness. It might in fact make us wonder afresh at the long, long tradition of regarding Pynchon as something of a stern despiser of the effluvia of mass culture, which accounts the archive of criticism (especially in relation to Gravity’s Rainbow) tosses up with remarkable frequency. Imagine my surprise to find that, though Pynchon is “no doubt … genuinely fond of much popular culture,” still the point of his allusions is to make “a devastating statement about the shortness of American cultural memory,” given how that mass-cultural product betrays so nakedly “the relentlessly ahistorical consciousness of contemporary American society.” “Unlike the world he describes,” we are told, “Pynchon himself has an acute sense of history that leavens his brand of postmodernism”—a leavening accomplished most of all, it appears, by invoking so much mass-culture excrescence the better to sit in “implicit judgement of this shallowness.”4 The sense that Pynchon’s novels robe themselves in this kind of imperious contempt for the cheapjack commodities of mass culture, and sees in them only the forces of degradation and capture proper to capitalist modernity, is curiously enduring. The counterpoint to which isn’t of course that Pynchon, given how nakedly beguiled he is by its byproducts, is really—haha!—a secret apologist for capitalist modernity. But to make Pynchon an avatar for some scholastic superiority to a vulgar and benighted commodified world— and who could imagine why it is that literary critics enjoy conjuring such a Pynchon?—seems especially tin-eared. For all the contrary strains of a novel like Vineland, I don’t know that “contemptuous” places high among its prominent affects. And it’s not especially clear to me how you can read the novel, paragraph by paragraph, and convince yourself that it is. What we find instead is a novelistic disposition in which, in a protracted way, the dire and the exuberantly ludicrous refuse to become disentangled—and where that comportment issues less in contempt than in a graciousness, an often startling tenderness of regard, toward even the most seemingly cartoonish of characters parading across the narrative stage. One vector for this indivisibly comic and grave disposition is to be found in metastructures like the Star Wars supracoding of the novel, as we have seen. But there are others. The nearer and more persisting register for such indivisibility, to my ears at least, is that lodestar of Pynchonian affect: the sentence. Now, with respect to the powers of the sentence, I think a lot about a professor from back in graduate school describing—with, it must be said, a certain stagey self-dramatization—his own recent first encounter with Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. It is a novel profoundly about loss, he said, and part of the cumulative astonishment of the book comes in the way it enacts that loss, moment by readerly moment. “Every sentence,” I remember him saying, “is so wrought, so beautiful and perfect, that you want to commit it to memory. But instead you’ve no choice but to abandon it and go on, in sorrow, to the next one.” Even then this struck me as a bit precious. Still, if it’s stayed with me this long, it’s likely because some part of it struck a resonating chord. I am tempted now to say that something akin to this is afoot in Vineland, though in a very different key and in the service of very different points of emphasis. For it is no more than a straightforward fact of the matter that, open the novel where you will, let your finger fall down the page without precaution or prejudice, and odds are you will find yourself stumbling almost immediately into one or another exercise in delirious verbal fabulation. Some of the time this is conceptual in nature, other times it is syntactical, and often enough it is just ordinarily lexical—quite as if the sentence, whatever else may be required of it, were in its essence an occasion for play one oughn’t ever to pass up. This is so much the case, and Pynchon so routinely treats the paragraph as less a unit of plot delivery than a kind of cul-de-sac of feverish invention, that once one begins quoting (as these pages have only begun to demonstrate) it is difficult to call halt. Here, offered for no particular narratologically sound reason, is the account of Zoyd coming to find Prairie at work at the “Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple,” which, a little smugly offered the most wholesome, not to mention the slowest, fast food in the region, a classic example of the California pizza concept at its most misguided. Zoyd was both a certified pizzamaniac and a cheapskate, but not once had he ever hustled Prairie for one nepotistic slice of the Bodhi Dharma product. Its sauce was all but crunchy with fistfuls of herbs only marginally Italian and more appropriate in a cough remedy, the rennetless cheese reminded customers variously of bottled hollandaise or joint compound, and the options were all vegetables rigorously organic, whose high water content saturated, long before it baked through, a stone-ground twelve-grain crust with the lightness and digestibility of a manhole cover.

(45) Those vegetables rigorously organic, those herbs only marginally Italian, are presented in the emerging Californian style, which is to say, a little smugly. Or here is Van Meter, a bass-playing old friend of Zoyd’s from his surfadelic days, sitting in with a band at a Thanatoid roast with a drummer, upon whom the shifting drug fashions of the eighties have not failed to register: “Van Meter had to keep forcing himself to slow down, not to mention the drummer, whose brightness of eye, wetness of lip, and frequent visits to the men’s lounge suggested a personality at best impatient, and who now and then liked to explode into these ear-assaulting self-expressive solos, hollering, ‘All right!’ and ‘Party Time!’ ” (225). Or consider Zoyd’s gig on Kahuna Airlines and the incident in which the vessel he is flying aboard finds itself pursued, and eventually captured and boarded, midtransit, by something faster, sleeker, and less explicable: As Gretchen [the “make-believe Polynesian cocktail waitress”] had foretold, not exactly a UFO. The captain took what evasive action he could, but the other matched his maneuvers exactly. Finally they stood, side by side above the tropic of Cancer, between them, some twenty meters across, a flow of savage wind, as, slowly, not telescoping out, but assembling itself from small twinkling pieces of truss-work, the other spun across to them a windproof access tunnel, with a cross section like a long teardrop, that locked firmly on to the forward hatch of the Boeing.

(64) Or, why not, recall the cousin of Frenesi’s who shows up at her and Zoyd’s wedding day, “one of the peak parties of his life,” on a hillside nearish to Santa Cruz: “Zoyd remembered her, among the roster of his in-law aunts, uncles, and cousins, as a tall florid girl in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank Zappa’s face, thus linking her in Zoyd’s mind somehow with Mount Rushmore” (39). One could go on and on and on (it is a temptation I find myself only barely able to resist), just as, if pressed, one could say a great deal by way of exegesis about each and all of such passages. There is the slanginess-in-ornate-Jamesianism-syntax I’ve already mentioned, which issues in that brand of demoticized hypotaxis Pynchon readers quickly become familiar with. There is the manifest pleasure in the deployment of slightly technical pieces of vocabulary (“twinkling pieces of truss-work,” say) in the service of dreamy fantasia. There is perhaps above all the insistence on that weakest of rhetorical forms, the joke, as an altogether apt vehicle for novelistic cognition and a resource not to be disregarded.5 Each of these sub-elements is alive and flourishing in the sentences of Vineland, and to them we might append several others. But the cumulative effect of bits of verbal play like this compounding end to end, because it is something rather more synthesizing, exceeds any one of them. Veggian, in his account, recognizes in Vineland a novel that “gregariously affirms the realist tradition,” one that emerges less “realist” as such than as an important variant: “a kind of narrative-historical synesthesia, anachronistic yet timely, ironic yet naïve” (158, 159). Again, I take this to be telling and astute, though I think an equally persuasive way to say it might be to suggest that what sounds in the unflagging fabulatory undertakings of Vineland is a performed detuning of realist verisimilitude and of the ordering of the world it ratifies. You could call the effect of this sustained performance by a lot of names: an estrangement, a destabilization, a fracture, a breaking loose or a cracking open or a lifting off. All of these designations will serve, inasmuch as the undergirding conviction they point to is the same. To put it perhaps a bit too flatly, it is simply that our gridded taxonomies of apprehension, formalized in everything from the orders of political economy to the modes of art we cherish (among these: the novel)6 to the governing epistemologies of our quotidian semiconsensual Real, do not come near to exhausting the

breadth and reach of the extant world—and leave out, in fact, huge yawning territories of even sublunary experience. These ordering forms may be tenacious, enforced with greater and lesser brutality, and may indeed lend to the world what coherence we believe it to possess. But they are not definitive, and they are not absolute. And this, for Pynchon, is less the occasion for melancholy, or expressive austerity, or philosophical resignation, than it is for that tremendous prankish unloosening we have been enumerating, one punchdrunk passage after another. If you wanted to get a sense of what it is that can make stepping into a novel like Vineland feel at times like an excursion into some precinct of life arrayed crosswise to the world, to the knowable and the already known, you could probably start exactly here. For me and my friends, this was quite entirely the case, and no matter how often we returned to it in our younger years, there it reliably was: that sentence-borne sensation of being carried over into regions considerably weirder, and funnier, and more unhinged—just a small bit freer, we’d have said—than we were used to inhabiting. This is something of what I mean when I say Vineland gave us new bearings, that it rewired our sensoria, and god bless it for that.

The novel, it will not surprise you to learn, has a great deal invested in exactly these slantwise orientations to the daylit world. Such orientations make up in fact what we might well describe as the setting of the novel, every bit as much as north California itself. For instance, at one point in the midst of the text the North Coast Thanatoids gather at a venue called the Blackstream Hotel. The edifice, we are told, dated from the times of the early timber barons, hidden far from highways, up along long redwood mountaintops where shadows came early and brought easy suspicion of another order of things … believed, through some unseen but potent geometry, to warp like radio signals at sundown the two worlds, to draw them closer, nearly together, out of register by the thinnest of shadows.

(219–20) Later on, in case we have not grasped the salience of that “easy suspicion of another order of things” that prevails along the slopes of Vineland, the novel returns to the point and, noting how early European explorers regarded the coast, puts it like this: Along with noting the size and fierceness of the salmon, the fogbound treachery of the coasts, 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, past the capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees—carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have known about but did not share.

(317) Even for those “not known for their psychic gifts,” for colonizers and bringers of extractive calculation, the landscape speaks of something less amenable to territorialization, some other intention, connected to what lies behind or within the visible world. And that, I would argue, is exactly what Pynchon takes to survive in the long shadows of the Vineland that is his setting: that ghost of the possibility of some comprehensively different order, aslant the world in its quotidian garb, possessed of a weirder physics, a potent geometry of its own. If you wished, you could of course write much of this off as a variant of tedious hippie mysticism, a kind of white mythology not markedly improved by its pothead flourishes. I maybe wouldn’t be so quick to do so, though. For one of the things to cherish in Vineland is the way this world crosswise to the known, proximate and intersecting but retaining some of its own uncaptured mystery, holds space in easy continuity with another world. This is the workaday world of capital, labor, buying and selling and bartering, struggling and hustling, getting through the forbidding day. Here, all of two pages subsequent to the passage about the haunted Vineland coast, is the novel’s account of Zoyd’s early years as a single dad, which unfold in just the same Vineland: Out in the perpetual rains on that coast back then, with a borrowed ladder and rolls of aluminum foil, he cruised middle-class neighborhoods for clogged or leaking gutters, doing quick fixes on the spot, then coming back between storms to make the jobs more permanent. He sold vanloads of plastic raincoats from Taiwan along with car wax and pirated Osmonds tapes at the weekend swap meets at the Bigfoot Drive-In, spent Februaries along with everybody else he knew going around in hip waders in the Humboldt daffodil fields, cutting them green, picking up poison rashes, and then, when the cable television companies showed up in the county, got into skirmishes that included exchanges of gunfire between gangs of rival cable riggers, eager to claim souls for their distant principals, fighting it out house by house, with the Board of Supervisors compelled eventually to partition the county into Cable Zones, which in time became political units in their own right as Tubal entrepreneurs went extending their webs even where there weren’t enough residents per linear mile to pay the rigging cost, they could make that up in town, and besides, they had faith in the future of California real estate.

(319) The fog-heralded intimations of another order, yes, but also leaking gutters, cable riggers, poison rashes. The Vineland of Vineland, in other words, is poorly conceived as some zone of pure enchantment—or for that matter of disenchantment, or of reenchantment. It is better apprehended as a scene of rival and interpenetrating orders: mottled, fractured, multiplicitous. We are getting nearer and nearer to what I would want to call the disposition of the novel, that sum of its layered atmospherics in the running together of plot, tone, idiom, scene. I have said that Vineland is a work not much afflicted with the expressive melancholy proper to modernist projects and their beautiful failures. Given Pynchon’s standing as an exemplar of what gets called, by now a little confusingly, “postmodernism,” this is perhaps not much of a surprise. Yet, as we can begin to see in the passage just quoted, that turn away from expressive exhaustion comes twinned in Vineland with a particular and pervasive style of regard, a committed tuning in the direction of the lifeworlds it invents and the characters that populate them, that is startling for what I can only think of as its breadth of fond compassion. Zoyd’s detailed labors, and those of his Vineland compatriots, exemplify some of what is at stake here. For Vineland is a work whose antic fabulations manage also never to disrupt its patient and painstakingly humane regard for the ways people struggle—the ways they create zones of refuge, give themselves and others comfort, and instigate their own forms of contact with the fragments of some inspiriting otherwise that infiltrate even a world as broken, as carved up and boxed for sale or rent, as this one. It is as though that scrupulous generosity of comportment toward the ordinariness of struggle were itself another of its acts of fantastic conjuring—a tuning toward persons and scenes that, within the grinding political climate the novel imagines itself entering into, requires every bit as much counternormative invention. Some critics have called this a “sentimental” turn in Pynchon, what with the centering of the drama of the nuclear family that seems in Vineland at least to go with it.7 That’s fair enough as far as it goes, though again I think it misappraises the tenor of the novel. It is a work of battered unsurrendered hopefulness, yes. But I am not sure I would want to consign its amplitude of regard to designation as something merely pandering or merely compensatory. Consider in this respect the movements of this splendidly showy passage, which comes at the outset of the symphonic concluding chapter, where the novel’s wary affirmation of the possibility of renewal is at its least guarded and most fine-tuned. It is, fittingly, a scene of day breaking: In fact, out of a long memory of strange dawns, this morning in the Shade Creek–Thanatoid Village area would stand forth as an exception. Not only had the entire population actually slept the night before, but they were also now wakening, in reply to a piping, chiming music, synchronized, coming out of wristwatches, timers, and personal computers … all playing together now, and in four-part harmony, the opening of J. S. Bach’s “Wachet Auf.” And not the usual electronic stuff—this had soul, a quantity these troubled folks could recognize. They blinked, they began to turn, their eyes … sought contact with the eyes of other Thanatoids. This was unprecedented. This was like a class-action lawsuit suddenly resolved after generations in the courts. Who remembered? Say, who didn’t? What was a Thanatoid, at the end of the long dread day, but memory? So, to one of the best tunes ever to come out of Europe, even with its timing adapted to the rigors of a disco percussion track able to make the bluest Thanatoid believe, however briefly, in resurrection, they woke, the Thanatoids awoke.

(324–25)

If there is a note of slapstick sounding here, with the unreconciled dead rising from sleep to the digitized chirping of “Spirits, Awake!,” there is much, much else to be heard as well. Listen, for instance, to that round-the-fire raconteurishness the narrative voice indulges in for just a moment, as it glides into cadences almost preacherly, quite as if the effort of all this tall-tale-telling were finally to hearten the weary, to rally the faithful once more. Give some space to the jokey companionability (Say, who didn’t?) it offers. And consider too, perhaps above all else, that delicate, that so sweetly proffered tenderness toward these wounded souls, these bearers of American injustices never to be righted, whom the novel here takes up in an embrace as full of studious care as it is of comedy. Listen in on all this in the right impressionable mood, with the dials of your susceptibility turned just so, and you too can find yourself bewitched for an instant or two by the promise of renewal on offer here—and maybe, while you’re at it, into a small fast-flowering of hopefulness, even for these Thanatoids. Yeah, yeah, yeah: just the ordinary household magic of fiction, you might say, and I mean, sure. That quality of wondering attunement the novel specializes in conjuring up goes by other designations, among which “mawkish credulity” is only one, and maybe not even the most disparaging. I offer it to you nevertheless as high among the states of readerly being a person might go to the novel looking to have induced, or nourished, or possibly even dilated out into an entire climate of spirit. Granted, this is not a calibration of soul liable to make you more productive or especially diligent in the tasks of your day. But it may be an attractive proposition nonetheless. Such, at least, is the opinion of some of the striving denizens of Vineland itself. Here is another exemplary digression, this one about the Vineland parrot population and flying children, about storytelling and the possibilities of grace, which in a million rereadings has never failed to undo me: A parrot smuggler in an all-chrome Kenworth/Fruehauf combination known as the Stealth Rig … showed up late one Saturday afternoon, parked beside 101 just across the bridge in unincorporated county, and sold out his entire load before the sheriff even heard about it, as if the town, already jittery, just went parrot-crazy the minute they saw these birds, kept drunk and quiet on tequila for days, ranked out in front of the great ghostly eighteen-wheeler, bundles of primary color with hangovers, their reflections stretching and blooming along the side of the trailer. Soon there was scarcely a house in Vineland that didn’t have one of these birds, who all spoke English with the same peculiar accent, one nobody could identify, as if a single unknown bird wrangler somewhere had processed them through in batches—“All right, you parrots, listen up!” Instead of the traditional repertoire of short, often unrelated phrases, the parrots could tell full-length stories—of humorless jaguars and mischief-seeking monkeys, mating competitions and displays, the coming of humans and the disappearance of the trees—so becoming necessary members of households, telling bedtime stories to years of children, sending them off to alternate worlds in a relaxed and upbeat set of mind, though after a while the kids were dreaming landscapes that might have astonished even the parrots. In Van Meter’s tiny house behind the Cucumber Lounge, the kids, perhaps under the influence of the house parrot, Luis, figured out a way to meet, lucidly dreaming, in the same part of the great southern forest. Or so they told Van Meter. They tried to teach him how to do it, but he never got much closer than the edge of the jungle—if that’s what it was. How cynical would a man have to be not to trust these glowing souls, just in from flying all night at canopy level, shiny-eyed, open, happy to share it with him? Van Meter had been searching all his life for transcendent chances exactly like this one the kids took for granted.

(222–23) Maybe Van Meter’s faltering efforts to unloose himself from cynicism and come into sync at last with these kids, these shiny-eyed glowing souls led into communal flight by the telling of fabulous tales, is not the most infallible model of readerly or critical comportment. Maybe not. I am here to tell you this, though: you could do worse.

By 2002, after maybe half a dozen years setting the novel in the heaviest of readerly rotations, returning to its comforts like a child to a favorite bedtime story, I’d begun to leave Vineland behind me. Not that I stopped loving it or stopped insisting on how stupendously fucking great it was to interlocutors possibly less invested in the point than I. But Mason & Dixon had appeared near the end of my time in grad school, which I promptly fell for with exactly the idiot engulfing ardor you’d expect. (A fantasia on Empire, Enlightenment, and the Misnamed New World, I liked to say; also, for good measure, a transcription into the idiom of the novel of a dozen or so of the greatest dissertations on early American literature never written. Etc.) Life meanwhile began its slow arcing turn out of prolonged adolescence—I was no longer “lingering on the sunny side of 25,” as Vineland puts it—and toward whatever follows from it. So I had not read Vineland for a while. But I did, again, at the end of 2002, and found it strange in a way I had not anticipated. Here is why: In October of that year, one of that handful of friends I mentioned—Paul—died in Chicago. I wish this were a story that could not be told in a few sentences. Despite being about the most outrageously gifted person a lot of us had ever known (he was among other things a jazz pianist, of the sort who gets his picture put on the cover of the Chicago Reader maybe two goddamn months after returning to the city), and despite how greatly we loved him, Paul suffered through private sorrows that, clarifying retrospect informs me, we then had nothing approaching the tools, or the experience, or the needed breadth of imagination to deal with. Not that we didn’t want to, and not that we didn’t try. It is the parent’s job, the psychoanalytic critic Adam Phillips writes somewhere, in a sentence by which I have long felt semihaunted, “to love the child into a belief that life is worth living,” and we his friends, who couldn’t much conceive either the extent of his pain or a world without him in it, tried with feverish determination to enact this dicta. But it was hard. That inner suffering made Paul susceptible to the more lethal forms of benumbing recreation floating around the scenes he was in—he played, then, mostly free improv—and so, despite everyone’s best and frantic and always-failing efforts, he died. He was a few weeks short of thirty-one, which the obituary got wrong. I flew out to Chicago from Maine, stayed with John, with whom I walked around the neighborhood, past the countertop diners and old-man bars, in a state of groggy stupefaction. I remember journeying out with John one night to some underground jazz bar on the West Side, where acquaintances of Paul’s from that scene were staging a sort of jam-cum-memorial. I remember losing track of him amid the clattering dark, strangers milling around, a sense of unhappy dislocation prevailing. I remember coming upon him at last at the door to the men’s room, where, unable to make each other heard over the din, and maybe having tired of pretending, we just sort of crumpled into each other, and clung there, while all the words we didn’t yet have came out as they would for a while, in dumb heaving sobs. And so, of course, inevitably, I picked up Vineland, hoping if not to mute then perhaps to muffle something of the clamoring awfulness. But reading Vineland then, just after the first spasms of horror had subsided, I was startled, in a way I guess I should have known I would be, to find Paul’s ghost all over the goddamn place. It was not comforting. And it wasn’t the book’s presiding drugginess that unnerved me. (I was afforded no cheap solace by objecting, in censorious retrospect, to the novel’s regard for the War on Drugs as a new vector in carceral reaction, no.) What I felt then was the pain of fresh loss, translated into a new key: just a small taste of that all-devouring nothingness that, precisely as my high-theoretical education had taught me, language can neither enter nor redress but only glance away from or dissimulate. More mundanely, it was like the desperate sorrow of truncated talk. Because, Jesus, what didn’t I want to talk with Paul about? I wanted so much to argue about how different the humor felt here at the outset of our own swiftly darkening millennium, with imperial war present and ramping up, oligarchic power speaking once more in the counterfeited idioms of aw-shucks Americana, reaction everywhere gathering its armies. Would Paul, too, encounter this new disquieting urgency lacing through the over-thumbed pages? Or would he regard with leavening skepticism any of my hasty, possibly too-indexical readings of the novel and its political pronouncements? (“But come the fuck on,” I was ready to say. “There is nothing about the Bush-Cheney DOJ, that whole scene of grinning prep school malevolence, this novel does not cruelly anticipate, you know this is correct.”) You wouldn’t call these newly politicized readings a rediscovery of anything, exactly—nothing of the novel’s political commitments had been, say, hidden—so much as a sudden fomenting vivification of counterpossibilities, with playfulness ceding just a bit more space to antagonism, the fact of state murder emerging as less and less incidental, and so forth. Or maybe that would all come later, as part of a slow rotation of appraising attention of which these were only the halting initial turns. I know only how badly I ached to talk—and talk and talk and talk—with Paul then. I know how much I wanted to speak of the proliferating sorrows of the

book, its amazing downbeat grace. I know I wanted to say something about how there seemed now to be this startling vein of griefstrickenness in the book, which maybe was always there but that we were only now far enough away from our dumb adolescent selves to notice. I know I wanted to read him this passage: And so it came to pass, one sweet May evening, with mockingbirds singing up and down the street, that Prairie’s slick head came squeezing into this world, Sasha holding tight to her daughter’s hands, Leonard the midwife easing the rest of the baby on through, and Zoyd, who at the last minute had dropped just a quarter of a tab of acid on the chance of glimpsing something cosmic that might tell him he wouldn’t die, gazing mindblown at the newborn Prairie, one of her eyes plastered shut and the other rolling around wild, which he took to be a deliberate wink, the lambent faces of the women, the paisley patterns on Leonard’s Nehru shirt, the colors of the afterbirth, the baby with both eyes open now looking right at him with a vast, an unmistakable recognition. Later people told him it wasn’t personal, and newborns don’t see much, but at the moment, oh God, God, she knew him, from someplace else. And these acid adventures, they came in those days and they went, some we gave away and forgot, others sad to say turned out to be fugitive or false—but with luck one or two would get saved to go back to at certain later moments in life. This look from the brand-new Prairie —oh, you, huh?—would be there for Zoyd more than once in years to come, to help him through those times when the Klingons are closing, and the helm won’t answer, and the warp engine’s out of control.

(285) Once, if we paused over it at all, we would have thought this was just funny for the way it routes grown-up poignancy through the pop-culture detritus of Zoyd’s mind. That I thought more of it all of a sudden—that Zoyd’s hope to glimpse “something cosmic that might tell him he wouldn’t die” felt more heartbreaking than anything else—was, in a small and awful way, pointless. Paul and I wouldn’t ever be able to make anything of it. In the previous chapter, I offered a small argument on behalf of the world-disputing languages we can sometimes make out of the agitation that visits us, the vehemence and the combativeness and the joy, in the presence of certain objects and then of certain people. Here it seems worth noting that the languages devised in such jubilant scenes do nothing—nothing—to obviate the blank and irrefutable fact that the people we love will die and that our loving them, with whatever devotion and whatever articulacy, makes no difference whatsoever in the unspooling of that mortal inevitability. That, of course, ought to be no kind of discouragement from loving even comparatively insignificant objects, like books and records and such, and delighting in the talk they generate and the related kinds of love, of objects perhaps less insignificant, that they nourish. But it does, I promise, make for a new kind of attunement and a new calibration of spirit—one you are unlikely to leave fully behind once it has found you. I do not have much in the way of praise for it, bought as it typically is so dearly. I will grant that it, too, has its clarities.

Part II Law enforcement is fighting a different type of war. We are fighting an unrelenting, never-ending fight against criminal predators in our society. While there are battles won and lost each day, there is never a final resolution—a final victory is never in sight. —Attorney General William P. Barr, remarks at the Grand Lodge Fraternal Order of Police’s 64th National Biennial Conference, August, 12, 2019

3 SCABLAND GARRISON STATE (’08)

A

few hours into a straight-to-streaming documentary about the evolution of the weed industry up in the Emerald Triangle of California —Vineland country, basically—there is an unsettling moment. Entitled, unpromisingly, Murder Mountain, the series proves to be a more edifying effort than its cable-sensationalist trappings might lead you to expect, especially with respect to the long-nurtured mistrust of policing agencies that prevails in the region. That mistrust pervades the Vineland demimonde, where the baleful influence of cops—be they the DEA field agent Hector Zuñiga, federal prosecutor Brock Vond, or any of their accomplices—is taken as a sturdy if generally regrettable fact of life. Of course, 2019 is not 1984. Ours are the heady days of legalization—and thus, one might presume, of a new comity between California’s backcountry outlaws and the various authorities in pursuit of them. Such at least is one of the investigative premises of the series. And so, toward the conclusion, we ride out with a caravan of cops under the command of Sgt. Kerry Ireland, of the Humboldt County Sherriff’s Department, as they descend upon a plot of land they have determined to be unlicensed and therefore, inside the new matrices of legalization, suitable for unannounced raiding. Sgt. Ireland, with a beefy white-guy geniality only moderately tinctured by cop-show selfseriousness, notes the history of violence among growers and notes too the concomitant necessity of an answering readiness among the forces of public safety. We then watch as from out of this fleet of trucks pour a handful of men in flak jackets and combat helmets, automatic weapons drawn, who then stalk about the grounds of a growery until, eventually, automatic weapons drawn, they apprehend a bleary-eyed and transparently scared-shitless young man. This, it proves, is Chris Waters, and we are treated to images of him cuffed, braced up against a car, everything that is not blank mortal fright draining from his pallid features. Sgt. Ireland is then shown walking back toward him, papers in hand. Come to find—funny story!—they are at the wrong parcel. They’ve got their coordinates wrong, and the place where Waters works is licensed, registered, perfectly legit. “Thank you for your cooperation,” the officer says to Waters, who risks a single flashing look—relief, terror, incredulity—back toward the camera. “Thanks again, man, I appreciate it,” says Sgt. Ireland, to all appearances without irony, to the young man whose great good fortune it was not to have been shot that morning, and off trundle the men. “That scared the shit out of me,” Waters says, having been rescued by his paralytic fear, the presence of cameras, his whiteness, an unseen choir of angels.1

You might think, reading Vineland, that CAMP—“the infamous federal-state Campaign Against Marijuana Production” (49)—is another of the novel’s silly confections, an imaginary entity Pynchon christened to convey something of the lunacy governing the police pursuit of the demon crop. But not so. CAMP is every bit as real as COINTELPRO, the FBI’s secret and spectacularly illegal counterintelligence program, exposed by a 1971 break-in to agency offices, to which the novel makes frequent reference.2 (Another real virtue of Murder Mountain for the latter-day Pynchon reader: it offers up astounding documentary footage of the CAMP raids conjured repeatedly in Vineland, complete with helicopter descents, the incineration of enormous bales of weed, and agents dressed up in the garb of military assault.) CAMP was, in altogether true fact, a complexly organized task force generated by the California Department of Justice, initiated in 1983, involving “local, state, and federal partner agencies,” according to the still-live description of CAMP on the Department of Justice’s webpage.3 When, early on, Zoyd encounters a representative from the considerably more fictive “NEVER”—the “National Endowment for Video Education and Rehabilitation”—he shows real acuity about the intricate funding structures proper to these entities. “Nice per diem,” Zoyd says to a man who introduces himself as Dr. Dennis Deeply. “You guys’re Federal?” To which Dr. Deeply replies: “Bisectoral, really, private and public, grants, contracts” (33). Bisectoral. It’s a fleeting moment but a telling moment—the briefest of idiomatic reminders that, when authority speaks in Vineland, it does so not solely in the language of automatic weapons, flak jackets, tear gas, helicopter assault. It speaks too, as here, in the sanitized nomenclature of administrative cogency and financialized bureaucracy. Not a lot of people, in 1984 or for that matter 1990, were naming that idiom of power neoliberalism, though of course eventually they would.4 And maybe it’s best for our purposes that they were not. Sean Carswell, in his recent Occupy Pynchon, contends that the post–Gravity’s Rainbow novels attend with forensic precision to “neoliberal capitalism’s exploitative system of privatization, deregulation, militarization, and free-market fundamentalism.” He pursues this claim with vigor and inventiveness, and it is an argument to which I have not the least objection.5 Yet my enthusiasm for these positions is matched very nearly by the sense that the by-now easy familiarity of the epithet neoliberal, and the conceptual haziness that accordingly clings to it, can obscure as much as it illuminates. In this, it is a bit like the “postmodernism” Pynchon was also said to exemplify and that we are now encouraged, correctly, I think, to “move beyond.”6 These conceptual idioms have their affordances, without question. It is indeed suggestive to think of Pynchon alongside a veritable peer of his like Jameson (as Christopher Nealon observes) or in conversation with scholars like Hardt and Negri, or Lisa Duggan, or Wendy Brown, or many another theorist of the neoliberal condition.7 But I’m not certain we get as exactingly as we might at the texture or tenor of Pynchon’s response to that condition by producing him as a kind of David Harvey avant la lettre. The clarities on offer in Vineland—about capital and securitization, say, or the bringing of imperial counterinsurgency back to the metropole, or what the novel calls “the true nature of the police”—may be thickly related to what we find in the works of all these theorists. But they may be stranger as well. In the previous chapter we noted the pivotal role in Vineland of state murder—and noted, too, how slow that basic fact was in dawning, in its breadth of significance, on me and those interlocutors I most relied on. Some of this I have forgivingly put down to youthfulness and its governing misperceptions and some to our still rather glancing exposure to grief in its less merciful manifestations. But I am no less certain that at least part of that glacial uptake was due to matters less private and more, let us say, historical—to histories Vineland is at pains to delineate and in which I was very, very much ensnared. And so, in this chapter, I want to suggest that Vineland, alongside its range of counterfactual fabulations, pursues two essentially historical polemics—and that these, in combination, can help thicken our sense of the entangled forces that make up the thing that tends now to be called “neoliberalism.” My claim is that Vineland is, in the first instance, a novel about the clarified emergence of a style, indeed an entire sprawling nation-defining edifice, of punitive political reaction. At the heart of this style, the novel proposes, is the fashioning of the state, top to bottom, on the model of perpetual counterinsurgency: a never-ending war upon elements internal to the nation, figured each and all as mortal threats to its perseverance, such that what is required of the state is not only unsleeping vigilance, and not only an ever-expanding system of penal confinement, but an overpowering, a fully military-grade readiness of response. Cross-stitching 1984 to 1969 and 1990 to 1919, the novel anatomizes in turn the naturalization of this mode of reaction, its near-total disappearance into the textures of the governing American Real. This, I think, is one of the principal stories the novel endeavors to tell, positing the late sixties as a moment not of initiation, or even rupture, but of solidification.

But here, in the novel’s fractured historicism, a second polemic comes into focus. For Vineland, appearing in 1990, attunes us too to the already solidifying preference for narratives of the sixties as a season of essentially cultural upheaval (think Generation Gap, Counterculture, all the rest of it) rather than, say, a passage of political crisis, one that saw the brute-force devastation of a variety of antistate rebellions. The Clintonite nineties hovering just over the horizon, with their technoutopic dreams of ever-ascending wealth and ever-diminishing social antagonism, would make it supremely easy to be forgetful about the scope and scale and gravity of these insurgent mobilizations. Or, to say it differently: they vanish as politics proper only to reappear as generational conflict, cultural unrest, component parts of what PBS fundraisers of the future would have us understand as this titanic generational justice-ward lurch, accomplished by bravely nonconforming youth. But the era of plummeting interest rates and Third Way politics—the era of the consummation of neoliberalism—would do more than accelerate the hugely amnesiac metabolization of what had been a period of violent political fracture through the scrim of a gauzy depoliticizing nostalgia. If Vineland is correct, that era would make it supremely easy, too, to be a more alarming sort of amnesiac about the tremendous surge of reaction that would, over the years following Nixon, only expand and expand and expand, becoming at last a sort of default setting, though possessed of a strange pervasive sense of itself as part and parcel of a basically liberal, indeed a basically progressive social order. That strange involuting transformation, Vineland proposes, was well on its way in 1984 and had grown into taut solidity by 1990—and certainly, certainly held sway over me, and whatever readings I endeavored, for a long distressing time. That, then, is Vineland’s twinned address to what we have taken to calling neoliberalism: as a political order it identifies not solely with market-triumphant privatization but with the perpetual carceral counterinsurgency required to secure it; and as a politico-historical disposition that causes much of the even glancingly insurrectionary past to sink into muteness and illegibility. As you likely do not need reminding, this is a form of political imagination that has yet to dissipate. Even now, one does not struggle to imagine the many styles of narration in which the good Sgt. Ireland himself might qualify as a kind of hero, protecting and serving a state whose great need, whose great longing, is for the unperturbed homeostasis that prosecutors, politicians, and various government-adjacent experts prefer to call “security.”8 But the past is never safe from the future. And so by around 2008, by which time I had begun teaching it, not even I could misplace the fact that Vineland was a novel written at once in the teeth of and against that amnesiac hegemony, with its committed misframing of an era of violent political antagonism in the neutered idioms of conformity and counterculture. Not that this was any great testament to my achieved political incisiveness. By the mid- and later aughts those heroicizing narratives, such as might frame out the likes of Sgt. Ireland, had begun quite obviously to fray, with War on Terror rhetoric authorizing more or less any spasm of state-sponsored assault so long as it billed itself as an exercise in making safe. And this was only one of the clarities emerging from their snug cocooning in liberalish dreams of consensus, everexpanding markets, a technocratic fix for every social ill. Maybe you lived it differently, but it seems to me hard to have passed through the escalating grimness of the Bush-Cheney years without so much as noticing how smooth, how frictionless the choreography that set renewed imperial ambition into vast synchronized motion alongside the sanctification of wealth and the wealthy, the evisceration of any conceivably public service or amenity, and what can only be called a kind of carceral fanaticism, a fever dream of penal sociality from which we have yet to awake.9 You had only to open your fucking eyes. And so Vineland too came to speak in different voices. They weren’t less funny, these voices, and they weren’t less sad. But they did give new horizons to the novel, or new at least to me. In their attunement to what vanishes from history—from our ability to say and know and imagine—they made this riotous and comic escapade of a book over into the thing I would now say it absolutely is. And that is a novel-length calibration, keyed to unresigned comedy, of acute political grief.

DL Chastain and Frenesi Gates, the paired heroines of Vineland, meet in the midst of a street battle. “The turbulence of the times was bringing all kinds of people into towns like Berkeley,” we are told, “lured, like DL, by promises of action” (115). Action is precisely what DL finds, along with the person of Frenesi, who’d been out with her camera and a bagful of bootlegged ECO stock since dawn, finally ending up on Telegraph Avenue filming a skirmish line of paramilitary coming up the street in riot gear, carrying small and she hoped only rubber-bullet-firing rifles. Last time she looked she’d been at the front edge of a crowd who were slowly retreating from the campus, trashing what they could as they went. When the film roll ended and she came up out of the safety of her viewfinder, Frenesi was alone, halfway between the people and the police.

(116) Into this scene comes DL, “riding her esteemed and bad red and silver Czech motorcycle, the Che Zed, overdesigned in every part,” who scoops up Frenesi and rides off, sunset-ward, “in a snarling dreamrush of speed and scent” (116–17). Call it a meet cute for incendiary times. Nothing authorizes us to map this episode onto any particular scene of Berkeley upheaval, but let’s anyway. Let us follow what clues we have and, taking heart from these as well as from the novel’s spirit of fabulation, drop them into a moment of historical time. Let’s say that this transpires in the autumn of 1967, as it onramps toward the world-historical spring of ’68. As for the novel’s clues, they are many: we know the bloody events of the College of the Surf, which come later, culminate in the summer of 1969. We know that Prairie is born in the spring of 1970. We know that the 24fps, the guerrilla film collective in which Frenesi and DL would be comrades, had been collecting reels for a while by the time of the group’s immolation at the College of the Surf, though given the density of political action between 1967 and 1969, how long that had been exactly is difficult to say. And then too, in evidentiary matters more circumstantial but perhaps more weighty, we have Frenesi’s postrescue exposition to DL, which offers among the least ironized—and also most moving—articulations of what we might easily think of as the spirit ’67, accelerating into ’68: Frenesi dreamed of a mysterious people’s oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light, achieved once or twice that she’d seen in the street, in short, timeless bursts, all paths, human and projectile, true, the people in a single presence, the police likewise simple as a moving blade— and individuals who in meetings might only bore or be pains in the ass here suddenly seen to transcend, almost beyond will to move smoothly between baton and victim to take the blow instead, to lie down on the tracks as the iron rolled in or look into the gun muzzle and maintain the power of speech—there was no telling, in those days, who might unexpectedly change this way, or when.

(117–18) Violence, resistance, transcendence, transformation, a mysterious people’s oneness, drawing together toward the best chances of light: if there are richer evocations of the dreamlife of ’67—outside the parameters of rock ’n’ roll, at least—I don’t know them. Were I induced to bet cash money, I would say that DL comes upon Frenesi in late October 1967—between October 18 and 21, to be exact —during the Stop the Draft Week protests targeting the Army Induction Center in Oakland. This was a set of coordinated actions, over several days, that drew movement figures like Joan Baez (who was arrested on the first day along with other Quakers and pacifists) and the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. (who visited Baez in jail). And it drew too what to many was an astounding response. The several thousand protesters who showed up on Tuesday were met, in W. J. Rorabaugh’s recounting, by several hundred club-swinging Oakland policemen in full riot gear.… A few protesters were arrested; many were beaten. More were taken to hospitals than to jail. “The street was dotted with blood, broken glass and ripped clothing,” noted the Oakland Tribune. After the police attack knots of stunned protestors could be found on street corners muttering, “Hell no, we won’t go.” The mood was ugly. Scott Newhall, the editor of the San Francisco Chronicle, was outraged that police had roughed up reporters and press photographers. Authorities apparently hoped to drive the press away so that they could attack the demonstrators without being watched.10

By Friday the scene was set for maximal confrontation, and that is what came, as two thousand cops were greeted, and overwhelmed, by a crowd estimated to be about ten thousand. If, as Rorabaugh suggests, “the entire episode resembled a military battle,” organizer Frank

Bardacke provided what is perhaps the most concise summary: “We had the streets,” is what he said.11 Who then could blame Frenesi for her dreamy insistence? And who could belittle it? What sounds in her conversation with DL is a commitment to a utopic horizon of possibility, though it is one ballasted by an alertness to the hard and club-wielding fact of violence. Note that in her devotion to the revelations proper to action taken, collectively, in the street, the sign of transformation for Frenesi is a changed relation to the scene of interplay between, precisely, “baton and victim.” She shows, that is, a ready familiarity with what were then the evolving tactics, and the favored implements, of counterinsurgency. By the end of the Stop the Draft Week, such tactics would have been notably more familiar to anyone with a newspaper subscription. (The San Francisco Chronicle, many years later, would headline its archived photos of the events thus: “1967 Vietnam War Protest Photos Show Savagery by Police in Oakland.”)12 Not that such violence was new. The Bloody Sunday attacks on marchers in Selma, at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, had taken place some two and a half years earlier, on March 7, 1965. And the previous summer, the summer of 1967, had seen uprisings against police violence—each framed out as a species of “race riot”—in Detroit, in Newark, in Milwaukee. If the occasion, locale, and targets of these actions were different, the presiding fact of state-wielded violence was not. Yet it was by all accounts easy for many on the ground to regard that week in the fall of 1967 as in its way pivotal: one among the several galvanizing turning points on the road to the wider conflagrations of ’68. What it galvanizes in the young Frenesi is a sentiment itself so instantaneously disreputable, so easily written off as gossamer fancy, that we can only understand her to be speaking to her new fast friend with willed defiance: “I have to trust the way this makes me feel,” she says. “Feels right, DL. Like we’re really going to change the world this time” (118). Laugh at it if you must; DL does not, but then she is in the midst of a mutual seduction. Vineland will at any rate prove to be less interested than you might expect in just how it is that Frenesi’s commitment to revolutionary possibility runs so spectacularly aground, such that by the summer of 1969 she has turned herself over to Brock Vond entirely enough to be a willing instrument not only in the undermining of political action but in the killing, the state murder, of alleged subversives. (One truly unhappy throughline in Pynchon is his fascination, never alas as far as might be wished from prurience, with what he repeatedly narrates as the susceptibility of certain women, the “fatality,” as he likes to say, for domineering men, men in uniform, fascoid masculine affect, and what Vineland calls “the dark joys of social control.” One can find oneself wishing he knew more women for whom there is little difficulty in cutting the difference between erotic preference and political praxis.)13 Frenesi the one-time revolutionary does indeed do all these things, though, to the lasting grief of virtually every character we encounter. But the novel is not plotted, as a kind of reverse bildung, along the path of her transformation. This is because Vineland is interested in a different story. It is not—or not only—the Oedipal story of Prairie’s dawning comprehension of her parentage, though it is through Prairie and her immersion in the 24fps archive while on the run with DL in Los Angeles that the narrative threads its piecemeal historical reconstructions. Nor again is it quite the inside story of Frenesi’s motives, of the step-by-step unfolding of her grievous conversion. In the place of any of these plots we find, I think, a differently calibrated story, which is one of the tactics of a given episode of counterrevolution, of their proximate effects, and of their enmeshment in an altogether longer arc of American power. This is much of the story Vineland tells. But this is not all. For to say as much is to recognize that, whatever else we may make of Vineland, it is also the story of what lay on the other side of these frenzies of reaction, in that diverse and only sometimes coordinate array of what we do well to call insurrectionary mobilizations. In these senses, it is at its political heart a story of what Joshua Clover, in an exquisite essay to which we will return, bracingly calls “a moment of armed struggle.”14

In the effort to give voice to this counterstory, Vineland puts us on the scene of a Bay Area street battle, and well it might. Think again of the Oakland of 1967, turning its local corner into the planetary upheaval of ’68. Famously, the Black Panther Party had been formed in Oakland by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, and by the spring of 1967 they had had their infamous (because armed) appearance at the state capital and had conscripted the incendiary Eldridge Cleaver, then a writer at Ramparts, who helped galvanize the party’s Marxist vision of an anticapitalist overthrow of the United States. On April 6, 1968—two days after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.—the seventeen-year-old Bobby Hutton was killed in custody by the Oakland police, having surrendered in the aftermath of a ninety-minute gun battle that Cleaver would later resonantly describe as “the first experience of freedom that I had.”15 Some two thousand mourners would attend his funeral a week later. The global unrest of ’68 would, inevitably, come to California in other forms as well, ranging from the massive United Farm Workers strike organized by Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta to the declaration of a state of emergency in Berkeley in late June to the Third World Liberation Front strikes at San Francisco State, which also saw an irruption of violence against protestors. All of this, of course, in advance of the Democratic National Convention, in Chicago, where the police spent much of the day and night of August 28 rampaging through the downtown. In less than a year’s time the founding manifesto of the Weather Underground would be issued, also in Chicago. Such, then, is the backdrop for the more concussively dramatic turns of Vineland. Clover, who is among the most gifted theorists of the riot in print, provides one especially suggestive conceptual framework for thinking broadly about the sequence that, in localized miniature, we’ve just narrated and that echoes so resonantly through the novel. His is a vision, in essence, of the political economy of ’68, and I want to dwell in its details for a moment. For Clover, as for the novel, ’67–’68 marks a decisive moment of crisis, and in Clover’s telling this is, distinctively, a crisis in the trajectory of postwar global capital. Very, very schematically: it is a moment in which capital’s ability to draw “more and more people into the formal wage” to meet its own demand for labor runs up, hard, against its own mechanizing, deindustrializing imperatives, which aim to “expel people from the same formal wage” in the name of improved production, cost saving, “efficiency,” and so forth. The eventual result of this collision is an expanding unwaged “surplus population,” who, unable to be absorbed into “the service sector, the tertiary sector,” are reduced instead “to informal economies, finding ways to capture a share of someone else’s wage at peril of starvation.”16 One potent way to conceptualize ’68, on this model, is as that cataclysmic instant when two entwined but nonidentical struggles meet, as waged and unwaged labor enter crisis at once, and, in Clover’s idiom, “circulation and production struggles cross wires”: “where riot and strike come briefly together,” he writes, in “a flash of illumination that has dimmed only because we have stared so long.”17 You mistake Vineland, I think, if you imagine it to be invested with overmuch fastidiousness in the details of formal subsumption, real subsumption, and their interrelation in the moment of (stalled) revolutionary crisis. (Though neither is it uninterested: recall the painstaking detail with which the novel narrates Zoyd’s life within, and the whole of Vineland’s organization around, the informal economies of repair work, minor construction, seasonal agricultural labor—not even to mention those proper to the weed industry.) But Clover’s work, as it excavates the management of this volatile scene, is greatly telling for the novel all the same. In the conclusion to his essay, he recalls to us how Charles de Gaulle, with his nation plunging further into crisis, chose to plot the course toward its redemption. At the decisive moment, confronted by riot and strike in escalating conflagration, the beleaguered French president drew upon the services of one General Jacques Massu: “esteemed paratrooper, torturer, and former prefect of Algiers,” as Clover observes. This, for him, is the illuminating moment. For here, the tactics of militarized colonial repression and of an explicitly racist imperial counterinsurgency find themselves returned, with all the static proper to translation, to the metropole. And this, for Clover, is what speaks most resonantly between Paris in ’68 and Detroit in ’68 and joins them not only to the 2017 riots in Seine-Saint-Denis but to its precursor in “ten thousand banlieues in 2005.” It is one version of what “crisis” comes to look like, after the irruption of ’68, from the perspective of the state—part of the point of which is that, after ’68, next to nothing does not look like crisis. Tellingly, in Vineland, the principal agent of this brand of Massuesque reaction is not in fact the military—or not exactly. It is the police. Or rather, it is the array of domestic security forces mobilized against insurgency or anything that looks remotely like it: local and state law enforcement, from Hector Zuñiga on down; the FBI with its COINTELPRO protocols, for whom Frenesi and her husband, Flash, come to work; and of course the Department of Justice, where the DEA is housed and where the prosecutor Brock Vond, young visionary that he is, has seen the future and knows it to lie in the routing of all available definitions of “freedom” through the ever-narrowing channel of “safety.” As Vineland is at pains to show, such reroutings as these effectively unravel any hard distinction you might wish to venture between “police” and “military.”

Think only of the novel’s resonant account of “harvest time,” circa 1984, when “CAMP helicopters gathered in the sky and North California, like other U.S. pot-growing areas, once again rejoined, operationally speaking, the Third World” (49). Or think of the detention camps Vond establishes for political subversives, from which DL eventually jailbreaks Frenesi (of which we will have more to say shortly). Or for that matter think of the work of that other great theorist of Californian militarized securitization, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, who argues exactingly in Golden Gulag that the sweeping naturalization of exactly this turn—this carceral assault on racialized surplus populations and the making-over of everyday life into the image of perpetual security crisis—would come to be the signature of the thing called “neoliberalism” every bit as much as manic privatization, fantasies of an undergirding political comity, or the marginless financialization of civic existence.18 Put all this together and what you get is a full vision of something like total counterinsurgency as a way of life. It is at any rate what Vineland, in a memorable locution, frames out as the practices proper to “the scabland garrison state” its characters are tasked with traversing. And so, rather than narrating the inner story of Frenesi’s gradual capitulation or building its plot around it, Pynchon’s novel of post–hippie fantasia addresses itself instead to the epochal shifts undergirding such dire definitional transformations as Brock Vond foresees—that more and more total engulfment of freedom by security—and as it does so posits the vaunted late sixties not as inaugural moment but, in ways both Clover and Gilmore help us conceptualize, decisive instance of consolidation. This is one component of its counterhistoricism. About just what is consolidated and what styles of carceral-minded counterinsurgency fold themselves into the quotidian business of American polity we will have more to say shortly. But it’s worth observing before we do that Vineland understands such seizures by reaction to issue in something other than proliferating subspecies of state violence, though these do indeed come to flourish. Those seizures, those reconceptualizations: they are also, the novel proposes, fantastically effective vehicles for occlusion. But what they occlude is not only the righteousness of acts of refusal, bricks through windows, fire in the police cruiser. It is not only the human indispensability of militancy. It is, rather, the totality of a lived social world in which such actions took on meaning, connected to the actions of others, made sense. In real and you could say Benjaminian ways, that totality, poised on the precipice of a specifically historical vanishing, is at the political center of Vineland. And it is also at the center of the novel’s prevailing counterstrain, that tonal undercurrent that flows crosswise to its flights toward the antic, the silly, the stoned. It is at the center, I mean, of its griefstrickenness.

Consider the novel’s treatment of the events at the College of the Surf—a scene of action far, far away from movement hotspots like the East Bay and thus so insular, so disconnected, as to make it seem the least promising locale for conjuring up the insurrectionary geist of the era. A small beachhead of a campus, “bracketed by the two ultraconservative counties of Orange and San Diego,” the College of the Surf is placed on a slice of land between the ocean and, up behind it, an enormous military installation (204). Unlikely circumstances, without question. “It was the last place anybody expected to see any dissent from official reality,” the novel tells us. Yet “suddenly here with no prelude it had begun, that same dread disease infecting campuses across the land” (205). What follows in the novel, though, is not some indexical transcoding of Berkeley or Columbia or the Instituto Politécnico Nacional. We are treated instead to something stranger: a sequence that is all at once parody of, fabulation upon, and elegy for the campus rebellion. The calibrations of each matter greatly—of burlesque, fantasia, political grief—and they are fine. Here, in its rollicking entirety, is the slapstick opening moment: It was a nice day, everybody was out in Dewey Weber Plaza enjoying the sunshine, boys loosening their ties, even taking off their jackets, girls unpinning their hair and hiking their skirts up as far as their knees, a thousand students on their lunch breaks, drinking milk, eating baloney-and-whitebread sandwiches, listing to Mike Curb Congregation records on the radio, talking about sports and hobbies and classes and how the work was going on the new Nixon Monument, a hundred-foot colossus in black and white marble at the edge of the cliff, gazing not out to sea but inland, towering above the campus architecture, and above the highest treetops, dark-and-pale, a quizzical look on its face. In the midst of a noontime scene tranquil enough to have charmed a statue, there arose, suddenly, the odor of marijuana smoke. That it was widely and immediately recognized later led historians of the incident to question the drug innocence of this student body, most of whom were already at least in violation of the California mopery statutes about Being In A Place where the sinister herb was burning. The fateful joint that day could have come, heaven knew, from any of the troop of surfer undesirables who’d lately been finding their way up the cliffside and in among the wholesome collegians, bringing with them their “stashes,” consisting—up till now—mainly of stems and seeds, which because of a mysterious anomaly in surfer brain chemistry actually got them loaded but which produced in those they were trying to “turn on” only headaches, upper respiratory distress, shortness of temper, and depression, a syndrome that till now the college kids, not wishing to seem impolite, had pretended to find euphoric. But that day, at the mere distant spice-wind scent of the Joint in the Plaza, other states of mind all at once seemed possible. Like loaves and fishes, the hand-rolled cigarettes soon began to multiply, curls of smoke to become visible, all from the same bag of what drug-agency reports were to call “extremely potent” Vietnamese buds, perhaps, it was later suggested, brought in by somebody’s brother in the service, since it sure wasn’t surfer product.

(205–6) It is all as cartoonish as could be wished: the Nixon statute, the baloney sandwiches, the traipsing through the idioms of FBI reportage, right down to the naming of the plaza after Dewey Weber, famed board maker and star of early surf pictures. It certainly seems unserious to the “Movement coordinators” who show up to find that at first, “Not only was nobody thinking about the real situation, nobody was even brainlessly reacting to it” (205). Even here, though, there are contrary indications, and not only in the passage’s closing reference to the war in Vietnam, the imperial misadventure providing the materials for disorder back home. For this weed-fueled day of sudden liberation on campus comes to a rapid crisis, as “before long [police] units from Laguna to Escondido were responding, what they lacked in coordination being more than made up for by the chance to handle, however briefly, some college-age flesh” (206). It is at precisely this moment that the campus’s accidental revolutionary, the man who would come to be at the center both of the uprising and of one of the novel’s principal tragedies, is jolted into new consciousness. Out that day pondering mathematical theorems, Weed Atman meanders instead into the heart of a melee in progress. Shorn of the novel’s habitual prolixity and pileup of dependent clauses, the scene unfolds in direct declarative bursts: “His thoughts were interrupted by a scuffle nearby. Three policemen, falling upon one unarmed student, were beating him with their riot sticks. Nobody was stopping them. The sound was clear and terrible. ‘What the hell,’ said Weed Atman, as a throb of fear went right up his asshole. It was a moment of light, in which the true nature of the police was being revealed to him” (206–7). It is perhaps deserving of comment that, whatever center of consciousness we understand to orchestrate the novel, it is here in possession of precisely zero uncertainty with respect to the question of the true nature of the police. We are invited instead, in sentences notably wanting in indirection, to observe Weed’s entry into this uncontested knowledge. Weed is not alone in these processes of reeducation. The person the novel offers as his literal soulmate—whose birth so nearly coincides with his stalled entry into Death—is Prairie, and she too, as she sits watching film reels unspool, has her own bits of nonknowledge to contend with. With news of Brock Vond’s renewed assaults descending upon them there in the summer of 1984, Prairie wonders to Frenesi’s former colleagues why the cops would come after them now, and involve such hugely disproportionate firepower. What could explain it? “In the olden days we called it the last roundup,” DL explains. “Liked to scare each other with it, though it was always real enough. The day they’d come and break into your house and put everybody into prison camps. Not fun or sitcom prison camps, more like feedlots where we’d all become official, nonhuman livestock.” “You’ve seen camps like this?” At once there seeped into the cheery space a silence like a stain in the light … “Yep, I’ve seen ’em, your mom was in one, you’ll recall, but better than us reminiscing and boring you, go to the library sometime and read about it. Nixon had machinery for mass detention all in place and set to go. Reagan’s got it for when he invades Nicaragua. Look it up, check it out.”

(264) It is perhaps the most frontally pedagogical moment the novel will venture.

Yet the scene of DL’s instruction only echoes, while amplifying, an earlier passage, one we have noted already and that for me is more resonant still. Here, Prairie is again watching films spool in front of her. And as she observes a scene of students at what was by then called the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, she realizes she is witnessing something every bit as remote to her, as hard to think, as her disappeared mother’s care. Led Zeppelin music blasted from the PA, bottles and joints circulated, one or two couples—it was hard to see—had found some space and started fucking. Up on the platform several people were screaming politics all at the same time, with constant input from the floor. Some wanted to declare war on the Nixon Regime, others to approach it, like any other municipality, on the topic of revenue sharing. Even through the crude color and distorted sound, Prairie could feel the liberation in the place that night, the faith that anything was possible, that nothing could stand in the way of such joyous certainty. She’d never seen anything like it before.

(210) We underread both passages, I think, if we take them merely as a mark of her sheltered youthful inexperience. Her desperate hunger to know more of her mother notwithstanding, Prairie is at no point distinguished for us by “naiveté,” “airheadedness,” or any of the other basically sexist shitty knocks on teenage girls that were ready to hand, should Pynchon have needed them. Something else is at stake here, and it is not generational condescension. Ventriloquizing 1984 from the vantage of 1990, the novel suggests rather more direly that the scene of “liberation,” the “faith that anything was possible”—even overthrow of the imperial United States, even as undertaken by people willing to contest the state’s monopoly on violence—had become phenomena for which the available reservoirs for comprehension had, by the high summer of 1984, dried up almost entirely. This, I would contend, is most of what Prairie sees on all that flickering film: a horizon of conceivability, caught and stilled, in the act of vanishing.

What, exactly, is disappearing? The novel gives us several indications. Frenesi and DL had solidified their intimacy as members of the 24fps, the “guerilla movie outfit” whose films provide Prairie her encounter with this empty space where a style of knowledge might have presented itself. “They particularly believed,” we are told, “in the ability of close-ups to reveal and devastate. When power corrupts, it keeps a log of its progress, written into that most sensitive memory device, the human face. Who could withstand the light? What viewer could believe in the war, the system, the countless lies about American freedom, looking into these mug shots of the bought and sold?” (195). Here, perhaps, is what PBS-styled histories would wish us to call their countercultural “idealism.” But they know a good deal more than this. The informal slogan around 24fps was Che Guevara’s phrase, “Wherever death may surprise us.” It didn’t have to be big and dramatic, like warfare in the street, it could happen as easily where they chose to take their witness, back in the shadows lighting up things the networks never would—it might only take one cop, one redneck, one stupid mistake, everybody on the crew could dig it, though in the usual way it was too hard for most of them to believe in, even when they began to learn with their bodies the language of batons, high-pressure hoses, and CZ gas.

(203, My Emphasis) This learned intimacy with the state violence proper to counterinsurgency—this less joyous version of carnal knowledge—is part of what binds the 24fps together and makes them an exemplary instance of the sort of secret public we discussed at length earlier, in the first chapter. But it also adheres them to other scenes, and to other persons, and to larger coherences. For instance: after the roundup at the College of the Surf, DL, once more in the role of rescuer, descends into Brock Vond’s bisectorally funded internment camp for subversives, and it is there that a brief and, to me, peculiarly moving little sequence unfolds. Among the detained in that scene of mass arrest, DL stalks with warrior precision and is startled to see a face lit by reflection from off the floor, one she then remembered from Berkeley, from the old Death to the Pig Nihilist Film Kollective. “Just happened to be passin’ through, lookin’ for Frenesi was all.” He hesitated, not long but long enough. “You’re here to bring her out?” “Want to come along, you’re sure welcome.” “Oh thanks anyway, it’s no worse here than where I was.” “But you’re a political prisoner.” He smiled out one side of his mouth. “I firebombed a car with a bunch of FBI in it—they all got out OK, I figured, hey, groovy, I total the car, they stay alive, so long dudes, have a nice violence-free life—only they must’ve saw it different.” “You showed disrespect.” “If I split with you now, they’ll put me on the Ten Most Wanted, have me back inside in a day—not worth it.” “Nice seein’ you again, brother …”

(253–54) It’s that last address to him, the fleeting endearment, that gets me. For whatever ironies we imagine to gather in her use of the word brother, DL understands herself and this unnamed militant to be—in another bit of idiom difficult, now, to play straight—comrades. They inhabit a shared milieu. It speaks between them, holds them both, and has contour and texture and structure, and they live, together, within it. They share not just a politics but a world. If I am moved by this still—and I am—it is in part because it is not especially easy, these late days, to speak of that world. I think in this respect of a very different, very beautiful small essay by the same Joshua Clover, which is also about ’68. This piece is called “Three Underground.” It takes up some ultrafamiliar songs from the seventies and, scrutinizing them in relation to the once-enormous fact of practiced militancy, asks us to attend to their strange mutual orientation toward disappearance: “a shared social vanishing,” Clover writes, “that was called going underground.” At the center of the essay is the wish to remind us that this disappearance was for a time so familiar, so legible and ready to hand, that its invocation—as oblique as a reference to “a basement down the stairs” or as declaratively direct as “the last time I saw Richard was Detroit in ’68”—could magnetize even fare as anodyne as, say, a warbling James Taylor smash hit. And “it all seems so strange,” Clover writes, gesturing toward something of the occlusion, the historiographic estrangement, that seems to me to preoccupy Vineland and to vivify its particular strain of sorrow. “There is a hole into which people disappeared,” Clover writes, that was called going underground. It was a moment within armed struggle. It is a thing that happened within that political milieu, a lived experience that people knew and understood, intimately if imperfectly. All understanding is imperfect. And then there is a second hole, which is the hole in our knowledge of this. It is no longer available to us how this phenomenon haunted song after song, transformed them, even songs that didn’t seem to be about this became about this, not because of some special artifice of the songs but because of the actual lives that people knew and the lives they led.19

It is no longer available to us, Clover says, and he is, I think, correct. And so when we imagine just what it is that DL and that young man understand themselves to share, or what makes the members of the 24fps comport as they do in the vicinity of a violence always ready to become lethal, or what world it is that Pynchon looks to fabulate into novelistic being—parodically, fantastically, and in sharp grief for its disappearance over a horizon of conceivability—we could do worse than recall this invocation of a lived experience that people knew and understood speeding toward its illegibility. This is the fractured and vanishing lived totality at the center of the novel’s plot, its politics, and its sorrow.

And listen: none of this is to say that Vineland is some sort of novel-shaped endorsement of Weather or of the tactics they pursued. Pynchon does not ask us to imagine that its cadre of insurgents has any less imperfect a vision of the world around them or the best way through it than we do of ours. (Though I would say nevertheless that Carswell is hasty—and to my mind very, very far from correct—when he takes Vineland as a brief against violence as a strategy in political crisis.)20 The quality of what I have called political grief that suffuses the novel may not be for a specific strategy or set of tactics or even for the now-foreclosed possibilities of a given moment of political volatility and struggle. It might be better grasped as the grief proper to the solidification of an entire mode of political imagination in which those tactics, the antagonisms they addressed, and the lived and shared social world that fomented them become unthinkable: no longer available to us as lived facts because subject to what Clover calls a hole in our knowledge that, as Walter Benjamin noted perhaps most famously, it is not especially easy to know how best to repair. You don’t have to call that particular distorting, derealizing, antagonism-deflecting mode of imagination “neoliberalism.” Vineland, as we know, prefers phrases like “scabland garrison state.” But it will serve. And maybe it is just because of that obliterative, amnesiac, ultimately gaslighting disposition of the political, or rather because of a creeping sense of its evermore total absorption into the grammars of the American Real, that the novel treats as delicately as it does those periodic flights of backward-looking yearning, so perilously close to plain nostalgia, its characters now and then embark upon. Here for instance are Zoyd and none other than Mucho Maas (first seen in The Crying of Lot 49) riffing for each other on the deathless acid revelations of scenes past and the repressive panics these inspired in the State: “Yeah, but they can’t take what happened, what we found out.” “Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up every minute, keep us distracted, it’s what the Tube is for, and though it kills me to say it, it’s what rock and roll is becoming—just another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over again that we really are going to die. And they’ve got us again.” It was the way people used to talk. “I’m not gonna forget,” Zoyd vowed, “fuck ’em. While we had it, we really had some fun.” “And they never forgave us.” Mucho went to the stereo and put on The Best of Sam Cooke, volumes 1 and 2, and then they sat together and listened, both of them this time, to the sermon, one they knew and felt in their hearts comforted by, though outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods was even then turning into.

(314) We are invited to mistrust pretty steeply this free-indirect Fitzgeraldian rhapsody—in a novel that features so prominently the IWW and the Blacklist and that is shadowed so much by Native displacement, it goes without saying that the America of Zoyd and Mucho’s youth was neither as green nor as free as they wish to recall. Nostalgia is another kind of forgetting, which any near encounter with boomer self-mythologization will swiftly enough remind you, and I think Vineland knows this. Still, even in its mistrust, the passage is keyed mostly to tenderness, as that small irruption of omniscient insider commentary—“It was the way people used to talk”—makes plain enough. Zoyd and Mucho and, it would appear, the narrative voice itself understand themselves to have lost something, and it’s not just youth. Plagued though at least the former may be with the indulgent self-pity proper to white men growing old, of their generation and of others, they see all the same that something cherishable has vanished from the world, or is about to, and they are grasping after it, fumblingly, self-pityingly, imperfectly. They are in mourning. So too, I think, is Vineland.

The later aughts, as I have mentioned, were a fine time indeed to reencounter works animated by a crosswiring of political rage and political grief. One especially uncanny moment of Bush-era rereading comes back to me, in part because once it landed, with its burst of microrevelation, it was impossible to unsee. Here was the passage in question, which is subsequent to the raid upon and thoroughgoing dismantling of the uprising at the College of the Surf, i.e., the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll. I must have reread it, sometime around 2008, a dozen times, as though it could untangle the previous half-dozen or so years of disaster. By morning there were scores of injuries, hundreds of arrests, no reported deaths, but a handful of persons unaccounted for. In those days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would kill its own civilians and then lie about it. So the mystery abided, frozen in time, somewhere beyond youthful absences surely bound to be temporary, yet short of planned atrocity. Taken one by one, after all, given the dropout data and the migratory preferences of the time, each case could be accounted for without appealing to anything more sinister than a desire for safety. At his news conference, Brock Vond referred to it humorously as “rapture.” Fawning, gazing upward at the zipper of his fly, the media toadies present wondered aloud where, in his opinion, if it was OK to ask, Mr. Vond, sir, the missing students might have gotten to. Brock replied, “Why, underground, of course. That’s our assumption in this, from all we know about them—that they’ve gone underground.” Somebody from the radical press must have infiltrated. “You mean they’re on the run? Are there warrants out? How come none are listed as federal fugitives?” The reporter was led away by a brace of plainclothes heavies as Brock Vond genially repeated, highlights dancing merrily on his lenses and frames, “Underground, hm? Rapture below. Yes, the gentleman in the suit and tie?”

(248) And there it is. The arrogance. The glinting disregard for the truth. The upper-crust smarm and unguarded contemptuousness and braggart’s relishing impunity. Dull, dull, dull would he be of soul who, by the later aughts, could not recognize in this portrait of Brock Vond an unnervingly exact anticipation of none but Donald J. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense from 2001 to 2006, a man whose press briefings about the war in Iraq set what in those days felt like a standard unscaleably high for self-delighted mendacity. See this once, I promise, and it never leaves you. And perhaps this was no great wonder. How fantastical is it that a novel concerning itself with Nixonian reaction should prefigure so forensically a man who was, after all, counselor to Nixon and member of his presidential cabinet? From Justice to Defense, across a scrim of years: here, at any rate, was one way to trace out the migratory patterns of a style of American reaction, crisscrossing the porous divide between “military” and “police,” in its ascent into a new and, by 2008 or so, quite unignorable prominence. As Pynchon tells it, Brock Vond had his eyes on just this sort of widening domain for policing from the start. The College of the Surf was never, for him, a threat; it was nearer to a live-action experimental theater: He had drafted, and sent up, and was about to have authorized a plan to destabilize and subvert PR3 with funding from one of the DOJ discretionary lines. “It’s a laboratory setup,” Brock argued, “a Marxist mini-state, product of mass uprising, we don’t want it there and we also don’t want to invade— how then to proceed?” His idea was to make enough money available to set them all fighting over who’d get it. It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as a scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might cost.

(212) Quaint, after 2003, to see such cozy reference to “cost.” Quick quiz: who said the following, on May 27, 2003? “When it comes to reconstruction, before we turn to the American taxpayer, we will turn first to the resources of the Iraqi government and the international community.” If your memory suggests to you it may have been an active secretary of defense, reward yourself with the most sparkling of gold stars.21 By the conclusion of the Bush years, these carceral entanglements—of empire and security state, military and police—would seem among the most usefully clarifying of polemics nested among Vineland’s multiplying provocations. Or so at least I had started to insist, after I began teaching it, around then, to the book groups in Maine that had hired me for guidance in “American Traditions,” in classes that, alas, never went as well as I hoped. Still, vivid and uncanny though it was, the ascent to frightful power of the utterly Vondish Donald Rumsfeld was hardly the only available throughline, from book to world, if one went looking for testaments to that recoding of safety as happiness, security as freedom,

that had come to govern imaginings of national life more and more absolutely. Those movements forward and backward in time, those trajectories imagined and otherwise, had other grounding points as well. They, too, were hard to miss. Here’s just one. Recall again our unauthorized proposition that DL and Frenesi meet, mid-battle, in about October 1967. Had you lingered in those precincts, and in those scenes, for about eighteen months—over and through the crises of ’68—you might well have found yourself in the vicinity of People’s Park, on Telegraph, up near the Berkeley campus. It was there, on the early morning of May 15, 1969, that several hundred California Highway Patrolmen arrived to clear the park—which had become an impromptu hub for local activists, and a haven—for bulldozers, which then began their work. What followed is a story you will perhaps remember being told. (It makes, in fact, for the culmination of Berkeley in the Sixties.) After a rally in Sproul Plaza, several thousand protestors marched to the park. “As the afternoon’s protest continued,” Rorabaugh writes, “demonstrators noticed that some of the Blue Meanies had stopped firing tear gas. Instead, one squad began to load and fire birdshot. Some shots were fired directly into clumps of people.” But this was only prelude. Later in the afternoon, “deputies replaced the birdshot that they had been firing with more lethal buckshot.” A bystander named James Rector was shot in the heart and died four days later. “All in all,” Rorabaugh writes, “110 people were shot. No one fired at the police.”22 Here, then, was state murder. Reagan called up the National Guard, who then occupied the city for seventeen days. It was an occupation not without event. On Tuesday, May, 20, 1969, the day unfolded thus: In early afternoon the Guard formed a long line along Bancroft and blocked access to or from the campus; other guardsmen sealed Sather Gate, while the highway patrol cleared and locked the Student Union. Thousands of students, shoppers, onlookers, and University employees found themselves trapped inside this box.… Suddenly, the police announced that chemicals were to be used. People looked around and saw nowhere to go. No one moved. Many did not even hear this announcement. Then a National Guard helicopter appeared overhead and sprayed the crowd with the most potent type of tear gas. “There is nothing like standing under a helicopter as it swoops down to begin its gassing run to inspire one with new vision,” observed Michael Rossman.23

Those images of helicopters swooping in low—so easy to intermix with like images of concurrent raids in South Asia—would become iconic. Kent State was just slightly less than a year in the offing. It was easy enough then, and it is easy enough now—as well as reasonable—to make Reagan into the villain of the occupation, though of course he rode that villainy into profound success. But he also had help. Recall the decisive turn, in the People’s Park protests, to lethal firepower. “Who gave the order to do so,” Rorabaugh notes, “has never been determined, although some have implicated Edwin Meese III, who was in Berkeley that day; he carried a custom-fitted gasmask.”24 This was the same Edwin Meese who, after his turn as chief of staff, would become attorney general, where he would famously object to Miranda rights, ramp up the War on Drugs, and do about as much as any one man could to bring into its new phase of hegemony the promise of a nation free because, and only if, entirely securitized. He is also, as Vineland reminds us, Brock Vond’s boss. By 2008, this would matter newly, again. For Meese’s labors did not end with the Reagan-Bush era. A relatively young man for his circle—he was twenty years Reagan’s junior—he would go on to put his name to several white-paperish texts produced under the auspices of the Heritage Foundation. Included among these are the following volumes, issued one after another: Making America Safer: What Citizens and Their State and Local Officials Can Do to Combat Crime, from 2000, and then, from 2002, Defending the American Homeland. From crime and safety to the homeland and its securitization, across the divide of 2001: it is a sequence scarcely to be improved upon. Pynchon himself, one suspects, would think it a little overdone. But that was Meese—never a man to waste an opportunity, he saw the chance for a regime of carceral securitization to become larger, more marginless, and still more naturalized, and he did not fumble it. Chris Waters, who was not shot by the Humboldt sheriffs mistakenly raiding his place of work in Murder Mountain, could probably tell you a good deal about that regime, were he inclined to talk about it. But then so too could Sgt. Ireland. On September 12, 2018, Humboldt County’s own Lost Coast Outpost would report that members of the county’s SWAT team had “spent the last week learning new tricks.” They had been participants in a program of antiterror training exercises, created through the diversion of Homeland Security money, called, in the note-perfect Pynchonian style, Urban Shield. “Urban Shield is a full-scale, international training program,” the press release reads, that “allows SWAT teams to practice tactical approaches in situations such as an active shooter in a school or office setting, terrorist acts at harbors, airports and public events, as well as hostage rescue. All scenarios practiced were based on real events.”25 Urban Shield’s own online materials proudly announce the exercise’s global reach, boasting participation “from the Boston Police Department, the Philadelphia Police Department, the Chicago Police Department, the Dallas Police Department, the French National Police, the Kingdom of Jordan, Bahrain, the State of Israel and other national and international jurisdictions”26—though, sad to relate, the funding for the program would soon be pulled by the Alameda Board of Supervisors, who adjudged the county sheriff’s office to have used it to misspend and misdirect federal dollars. The program was discontinued.27 Before this, though, were the exercises of 2018. And there among the pictured officers, in the photos provided by the Lost Coast Outpost, is none but Sgt. Ireland. I should have said: when I began teaching Vineland, between 2006 and 2008, I did so to groups of kind and bookish and basically welldisposed professional adults, most of them older than I, with whom it was largely a pleasure to be in conversation. And, virtually to a person, they fucking hated it. In one memorable class, a local lawyer insisted with some agitation that the whole thing was all overdrawn, overcooked—a fantasy of conspiratorial state malfeasance cued up to satisfy the hungry nostalgia of old leftists. COINTELPRO was a long long time ago, he reminded us all, adding that there was nothing aging hippies loved more than overstating the mortal stakes of their bygone seasons of protest. I did what I could, I promise you. I rolled out my Vond-as-Rumsfeld pitch, talked up the security state, the aspirations to empire. None of it landed. As far as the lawyer was concerned, there had been upheaval in the culture, and then there had been real change and—our terrible moment of Bush-Cheney regression notwithstanding—we were all the better for it. More or less everyone agreed. We moved on. This is more than ten years ago, but I think about it a lot, the way you do with your moments of stark pedagogical failure. They didn’t think the novel was ungraceful, these grownup students of mine, and they didn’t think it was unfunny. They appreciated how much it seemed to mean to me. But they thought it was, in a tedious way, unreal—by which they meant indulgent, ahistorical, unhistorical. I spent a long time wishing I’d been better able to make Vineland speak to them contrarily, as something counterhistorical: something interested in everything the politics of the present estranged from us, even in the seemingly very near past. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t find the phrases. It’s cold comfort, but I will confess to feeling some vindication in that fact that, were the class running today, I absolutely could. I know it. And anyway, it’d all be so much easier to believe.

4 SECRET RETRIBUTIONS (’19—…)

T

here are a great many ways to dislike Vineland. Not all of them involve an impatience with puns, distended syntax, the propensity of characters to break into songs of greater and lesser inanity, slapstick punchlines. To these idiosyncrasies of taste and tolerance we might append a series of matters less, say, cosmetic—vexations of form, of content, and of execution that not even a partisan as unreconstructed as I am would pretend away. I have mentioned already the occasionally cringey quality of the novel’s attention to women—to their tastes and tolerances, their desires and devotions. A delectating prurience is part of the problem (especially, again, with respect to its characters’ eroticized hunger for fascoid affect in men), but the gender trouble does not entirely end there. There is, to take the nearest example, DL’s striking nonchalance, during her brief period of Yakuza captivity, about the sex work she is not free not to do1—and, along with this, a sort of invisibilization, or at least novel-wide minimalization, of sexual violence as among the more debilitating threats hovering around the lives of its female characters. More generous ways of reading these dynamics are available to us, certainly—Molly Hite’s work is especially useful in this respect, I think2—and these would attune us to Vineland’s regard for the battered-but-unbroken savoir vivre of the women it portrays, its interest in their relations to one another, as well as its commitment to locating the strongest throughline of revolutionary possibility in, precisely, women—in the matrilineal lines that join Prairie to Frenesi, as well as to DL, and back to Sasha Gates and Eula Becker. All of this is real and all of this is true. Yet one can easily see the justice in Joanna Freer’s claim that, at least in “certain aspects of his narrative treatment of women,” Pynchon “has failed to learn the lessons of the New Left.”3 The dudeishness that so saddles the archive of Pynchon criticism, though mitigated in many ways in Vineland, is nevertheless not especially hard to detect. Then, too, there is the novel-wide attentiveness to the postwar American fetishization of, essentially, Asianness—especially as it comes to flourish in a range of Californian cultures and subcultures. This, we could say, is an investment in Asian fetishization that is not always, and not especially cleanly, separate from fetishizing impulses of its own. The novel leans hard into the comic opportunities presented by a yuppified Californian culture hearkening back to the ill-understood and steeply mystified Disciplines of the East. Nowhere is this more vivid than in the depiction of “the mountainside retreat of the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives,” which Pynchon offers as having been “Described in Aggro World as ‘a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers’ ”: By the 1960s the kunoichi, looking for some cashflow themselves, had begun to edge into the self-improvement business, not quite begun to boom as it would in a few more years, offering, eventually, fantasy marathons for devotees of the Orient, group rates on Kiddie Ninja Weekends, help for rejected disciples of Zen … and other Eastern methods. Men of a certain age in safari outfits and military haircuts and quite often in the grip of a merciless nostalgia could always be expected to show up with ogling in mind.

(107) This strain of cheerful satire answers nicely to Vineland’s more-than-fascination with the argot, the arcana, and the fabulatory possibilities of martial arts lore, with its proliferating subdisciplines and baroque taxonomies of action and counteraction. (See here, again, the Vibrating Palm.) All of which gets wound together in what is perhaps the novel’s largest parodic set piece, in which a young Takeshi Fumimota attends to “the mysterious obliteration of a research complex belonging to the shadowy world conglomerate Chipco,” which left behind only a “gigantic animal footprint”—a “foot-shaped crater”—as might have been left by some creature that “had come up out of the surf, put one foot in the sand for leverage, and stomped on the lab with the other” (142). How better to introduce Takeshi’s dire entanglement with the corporate forces of “Wawazume Life & Non-Life” (143) than by placing him, and his cohort of fixers, among the iconic trappings of a Godzilla movie? Except that Takeshi never quite steps out of it. Though he becomes central to the plot of the novel, though his pairing with DL sets him in a register of character and characterization that is marked (as other registers are not) by rich interiority effects, passages of sorrow and regret, arcs of emotional transformation—though the figure of Takeshi lands amid these other traditionally developed novelistic characters, never does he quite rank among them. The joke about the rhythm of his translated and accented speech (“… he’d gone off to Tibet—to save his soul!” [147], “Not much I can think of, with that—no sex clause and all!” [167], “It’s a trick—of the morning light!” [173], etc. etc.) grows pretty threadbare, especially as the interiorizations and psychologized character effects that are extended to the Anglos around him fail, protractedly, to encompass him. He is not one of the swiftly sketched minor figures the novel multiplies, in the Dickensian mode, but neither does he quite emerge more amply. Strung up between these registers, in proximity to a style of characterization not proffered to him, he appears rather more in the unhappy guise of caricature. One thinks at an angle of Toni Morrison’s description of Jim, in Huckleberry Finn, whose mode of characterization mantles him “like an ill-made clown suit that cannot hide the man within.”4 Such uneasinesses as these might incline a reader, in turn, to regard with at least some leavening skepticism the novel’s depiction of a crisis in securitization, militarized policing, and carceral counterinsurgency—or, at least, some of its inflection. Here, the matter is really one of milieu. For to set that crisis primarily among figures in proximity to student movements, one could contend, is to consign your history to a setting that skews notably middle class and very, very white. One might grant that not much at all about the remaking of the civic sphere on the model of perpetual counterinsurgency is lost on the novel, including the instrumentalization of race, and race panic, as a principal lever for the consolidation of carceral power. Allowing all that, with whatever critical generosity, one might yet find less than wholly clarifying the novel’s turn to a scene of ex-radicals under renewed assault as an exemplification of the new horizon of reaction and securitization. If Clover is right to say that ’68 marks, broadly, the moment of explosive crossing between crises of wage labor, on the one hand, and on the other crises of populations unable to be assimilated to the wage—racialized surplus populations, staging their rebellions in places like Watts, Detroit, Chicago, Oakland— then the novel might be said to tilt distortingly away from those latter scenes, preferring as settings those peculiar Californian sociabilities proper to the former (like that at, say, the College of the Surf). And this, one might say, makes for a cumulatively misappraising sort of historiography. I don’t know how much of this critique I’d ultimately sign off on, but that’s not because it strikes me as unreasonable or unduly belittling in its premises. “Whatever’s fair,” Pynchon wrote about estimations of his own work, and he was right to. These, then, are just a few of the modes of political-aesthetic critique that might attach to the novel, although, in another idiom, one might just go ahead and say—as has been said to me, as I’ve defended it, more than occasionally—that Vineland is, also, whatever else it may be, kind of a fucking mess! If, say, you prefer your books tightly plotted, if you don’t greatly cherish digressions that extend over chapters and chapters that spill out toward fifteen or twenty thousand words, if you’re not overly enamored of shaggy-dog raconteuring, prefer a certain consistency in the mode of characterological verisimilitude on offer within a single frame, don’t think recountings of domestic atrocity are well paired with a pervasive cartoonishness, don’t find the sixties especially interesting, California especially intoxicating, Jamesian syntax especially tolerable, or stoner humor especially humorous, then well might you venture into Vineland, drag yourself through a couple of chapters, and be like, “Yeah, I mean: no.”

Friends, compatriots: let there be peace between us. It would take a special quality of enthrallment to insist that there is no truth to any of this, and, blinkered and smitten and very possibly enthralled though I may be, I am not that fool. Or, I suppose I should say, not quite. I write these words in 2019, in the midst of an extended season of political horror that shows not a lot of signs of passing over—nonfigurative fascisms resurging globally; an archipelago of concentration camps arrayed along the border, where stolen children die in cages; a doomy climate-accelerated resource panic energizing fully murderous ethnonationalisms everywhere and, with these, a doubled and tripled and quadrupled commitment to the inviolable sanctity of the police and to the desperate necessity of security. I say all this as though you didn’t know it already—didn’t carry it in your shoulders and sinews, didn’t hold it in your lungs—but of course you do. Even here, though, even now, I have found myself not quite capable of putting to rest the sense that clumsy and fault-filled Vineland, very nearly thirty years behind us, just gives and gives and gives. By which I mean that it is cajoling and inspiriting and, yes, riotous (and who among us does not wish to laugh?). But also that there may yet be resources there—in its comedy, its sorrow, its rage, and, most of all, in the specific density of their interaction—for thinking more expansively, and less paralytically, even about the catastrophic now. Of course, this could all be nothing more than delusive faith talking—an excess of need doing its wishful work on what is after all just a goddamn novel: a bit of pleasing ephemera, another of those “slight, useless things to calm the mad,” as Robert Lowell somewhere says of our fetishized objects of failing belief. Who am I to say that’s not the hard unlovely fact of the matter? And yet.

Here is one way I do not dislike Vineland, or Pynchon more generally. It comes from a review of Against the Day, Pynchon’s overstuffed epic of twentieth-century counterhistory: “Whereas Mr. Pynchon’s last novel, the stunning ‘Mason & Dixon,’ demonstrated a new psychological depth, depicting its two heroes as full-fledged human beings, not merely as pawns in the author’s philosophical chess game, the people in ‘Against the Day’ are little more than stick figure cartoons.” And then, should this have been in any respect unclear: There are hordes of subsidiary characters, many of them no more than bit players with walk-on parts, who are memorable only for their whimsical names or peculiar professions. “Against the Day” seems to want to provide an encyclopedic look at a rainbow-wide spectrum of people going about their business in the years before World War I. In the course of more than 1,000 pages we meet anarchists and arms dealers and alchemists, capitalists and con men, as well as miners, magicians, mathematicians, motorcycle pilgrims and a mayonnaise expert.… The problem is these characters are drawn in such a desultory manner that they might as well be plastic chess pieces, moved hither and yon by the author’s impervious, godlike hand. Sad to say, we really don’t give a damn what happens to them or their kith and kin.

In sum, then: For all its razzle-dazzle brilliance, Mr. Pynchon’s earlier work tended to be cold, hard and despairing: devoid of any real sense of human connection, soulfulness or redemption. That began to change with his 1990 novel “Vineland,” which evinced a new interest in an individual’s relationship to family. … Although this impulse can be discerned in “Against the Day,” it’s blunted and stillborn … because these people are so flimsily delineated, their efforts to connect feel merely sentimental and contrived. And that, in the end, is one of the more telling problems of this labored production.

Such was Michiko Kakutani’s panning, from November 6, 2006, in the New York Times.5 It is a review that has the virtue of an absolute clarity. The disappointing and even aggravating thing about Pynchon, in this account, is his tendency to be drawn away from the largest tasks of novelistic representation, at the deep moral core of which is the singular magic of character making. Distracted by his own polymath fascinations as well as by an irritating commitment to his own cleverness, Pynchon forgets to transform his varied figures into people, with whom we his readers can grieve and cheer, feel connected, sense as lively tingling bits of a mislocated reality, to which we are granted an exhilarating fugitive access for as long as we turn page after page. Where there should be characters, there is caricature; where there should be the warmth of connection, there is only something unyielding and cold. Why bother with the novel as such, this line seems to go, if you’re going to botch its signature power, which is nothing other than its uncanny facility for world building, at the stabilizing center of which is the evocation of the conflicts and complexity, the what-a-piece-of-work-is-man richness, of human character? In certain senses, this is fair enough. If you go to Pynchon looking in this way for the aesthetic machinery of the nineteenth-century novel, even as remixed toward ironizing complication by a variety of postmodern flourishes, you will likely emerge disappointed and maybe even aggravated. This is patently not, however, because Pynchon has no regard for the aesthetic machinery of the nineteenth-century novel or, for that matter, for the specific technologies of character that come to a certain kind of fruition there. The person who names one of his narrators “Wicks Cherrycoke,” I think we can agree, is not a writer whose affection for a history of the novel that would run through, say, Dickens is much in dispute. (Or Rex Snuvvle, or Shasta Fay Hepworth, or Tantivy Mucker-Maffick …) But the line on Pynchon’s inhuman and character-lite coldness does more than rehearse, in a slightly statelier key, those many disquisitions on character and “relatability” familiar now to readers from message-board commentaries, Goodreads, and the Amazon reviews page. It rests too on some steep misapprehensions, both about “the novel” and about Pynchon’s relation to it, and these are in their way revealing. First, then: the identification of the novel with the thick interiorization effects I’ve described makes for a very poor reading of novelistic character. Even in its maximally psychologized, most hegemonically “realist” modes, novels proliferate several kinds of character and can’t be reduced to just the one. The simplest way to say this is perhaps to note that not everyone is Dorothea Brooke, not even within Middlemarch. Even if we were to bracket the long histories of novelistic character, which would necessarily include a more serious consideration of the complexly “flat” character of eighteenth-century fiction, and even if we conceded for the sake of argument this naturalization of “the novel” in its ripe realist mode, still the picture that emerges is not remotely so uniform.6 Dickens, that obvious Pynchon forebearer, is perhaps the most illustrative example. To sit down with Bleak House is indeed to encounter figures of great “psychological depth,” in Kakutani’s terms, like Lord and Lady Dedlock, the wards of Jarndyce, the lawyer Tulkinghorn, even the indelible Krook. But it is to venture too into a world given substance and shape by innumerable fictive persons manifestly not deployed for purposes of interiorization, psychological portraiture, or any sort of bildungesque evolution. The thronging and textured Dickensian world functionally is that panoply of variously inflected types, circulating in vivifying relation to figures offered at different scales of psychological characterization. These “minor characters,” as a scholar like Alex Woloch reminds us, are entirely of and in the tradition of the novel and are indeed among the most elemental grammars of its construction.7 Which is only one, considerably less irritated way of thinking about Pynchon’s abundant affection for them. This is all clear enough. (Kakutani might well respond: Pynchon could use more Lady Dedlock, less Guppy.) But there is a further and I think graver misapprehension involved in taking Pynchon to be a novelist who keeps loving the novel and, in his weaker seasons, failing at it, failing to hit its marks or to live up to its most winning protocols. All I would wish to say on this score is that Pynchon’s love of the novel—which I am absolutely willing to grant—does not work like that. (In a book of criticism such as this one, entailed in extended consideration of the kinds of effectivities that might follow from the love of certain sorts of object, this seems a point especially worth insisting on.) That love is not imitative or replicative, is not an Eliotic extrusion of individual talent into the reach of tradition or a Bloomian struggle against Oedipally menacing forebearers. Nor again, I would insist, is it a matter of irony, reversal, parody in the many registers we have been taught to recognize as postmodern. What transpires in the charged space of Pynchon’s regard for the thing hypostasized as “the novel” is weirder, and denser, and, for our purposes, greatly more edifying. Consider, for a moment, the work Kakutani singles out for praise in her notice. This is Mason & Dixon, the much-celebrated novel that appeared in 1997, which Pynchon appears to have been in the midst of composing while also working on, and then completing, Vineland. Here is a work that features, among its other restagings of Enlightenment invention and invective, protracted discussion about, precisely, the Novel. Unsurprisingly, there is a rehearsal of some excellent period-piece anti-Novel fulmination. “I cannot, damme I cannot I say,” one character insists, “energetically enough insist upon the danger of reading these storybooks,—in particular those known as ‘Novel.’ Let she who hears, heed. Britain’s Bedlam even as the French Salpétriére being populated by an alarming number of young persons, most of them female, seduced

across the sill of madness by these irresponsible narratives, that will not distinguish between fact and fancy.”8 But such passages as these, delighting though they are in their finely tuned parodic reach, are small parts of an altogether larger metaformal meditation. I’ve said already that Mason & Dixon is in essence a twentieth-century fever dream of the Anglo eighteenth century, a counterhistory of European modernity in much the way Vineland might be framed as a counterhistory of the American twentieth century. But this, and the season of their composition, is not all that adjoins these works. As with Vineland, you can everywhere feel Mason & Dixon addressing itself to, and attempting to orchestrate, tensely divergent strains. Most broadly, the novel works as an extended encounter between what we might think of as a fairly conventional liberal humanism—skeptical, outraged, humane—and a differently tuned quality of horror, as well as a differently inflected fury, in the face of the vast projects of rapacious brutality for which that humanism is, then as now, a commonplace mask. It’s no exaggeration to say the book, which is at root a story about male friendship, is chiefly fascinated by what we could call the horrors of power. Here is Dixon at the scene of a 1763 massacre, by the Paxton Boys, of Conestoga Indians: “He sees where blows with Rifle-Butts miss’d their Marks, and chipp’d the Walls. He sees blood in Corners never cleans’d. Thankful he is no longer a Child, else he might curse and weep, scattering his Anger to no Effect, Dixon now must be his own stern Uncle, and smack himself upon the Pate at any sign of unfocusing” (347). That’s a fine term for what, with respect to the dire entanglement of Enlightenment ideals and modern atrocity, the novel puts itself everywhere on guard against: unfocusing. No surprise, then, to find it is slavery that, in its global ubiquity and exterminatory violence, most emblematizes for the novel the wild avarice of capital and all its enlisted powers. “ ‘Ev’rywhere they’ve sent us,—the Cape, St. Helena, America,—what’s the Element common to all?’ ” Dixon asks. “‘Slaves. Ev’ry day at the Cape, we lived with Slavery in our faces,—more of it at St. Helena,—and now here we are again, in another Colony, this time having drawn them a Line between their Slave-Keepers, and their Wage-Payers, as if doom’d to re-encounter thro’ the World this public Secret, this shameful Core’ ” (692). Well enough—and hard, at moments like these, not to think of Vineland, and of the exploitation-maddened scabland garrison state on offer there. But among the amassed and conscripted powers anatomized in Mason & Dixon, Pynchon takes care to tally not only the rifle and the lash. He numbers also cartography, astronomy, and many another instrumentalization of Enlightenment Reason, inasmuch as these, too, contribute their measure to the territorialization of a world that might have been known otherwise, outside of the terms of the chart, the map, the ledger, that “Net-Work of Points already known, that slowly triangulates its Way into the Continent, changing all from subjunctive to declarative, reducing Possibilities to Simplicities that serve the ends of Governments,—winning away from the realm of the Sacred, its Borderlands one by one, and assuming them unto the bare mortal World that is our home, and our Despair” (345). And it is here that the novel’s meta-ambitions come into focus. For the Novel itself, unruly stepchild of the eighteenth century, is as much a part of this overcoding of the world—is for the book as much a technology of modern territorialization—as it is a vehicle for elaborate protest. It is, for Pynchon, among the vexed Enlightenment inheritances that cannot be taken up without some focusing attention to its enmeshment in projects of brutality that, like the humanism it is said to champion, it seems so entirely to oppose. This is only one of the defining tensions that magnetizes Mason & Dixon, around which its multiple arcs are densely constellated. Perhaps it goes without saying—though I will say it—that none of this stands as evidence that Pynchon, or Mason & Dixon, or for that matter Vineland is profitably understood as being against, say, novelistic form. But it does give us a way to pose less flattening questions about his relation to the novel and to the technologies of character that are among its inheritances. For what is often described as Pynchon’s postmodern denaturalization, his detonating “exposure,” of conventional narrative form seems to me better understood in slightly torqued terms: as, I think, an articulate mistrusting of just these formal affinities and enthusiams, but of a sort that will not indulge in the pretense of an unbeguiled indifference or superiority to them. In Mason & Dixon, this welding of unforesworn affinity and extended mistrust makes itself vivid across registers. The outblown picaresque plotting, the migration of characters from intertexts to main text, the talking ducks and dogs, the Pennsylvanian Golem: all of these are more than comic interludes and more than gestures toward imperious Reason’s Others, its disavowed outside. They are, I would submit, part of a terrifically generative, career-wide quarrel with form, a roving, gregarious, open-hearted worrying over the nineteenth-century ideal of the novel to which Pynchon is at once deeply attached—for its multiple technologies of character, its illuminated interiorities and psychological richness, its humane attentiveness to the tumults of love, of grief—but whose complicities in horror he everywhere refuses to disavow. Sometimes that refusal is narrated. “History,” we are told, needs most “to be tended lovingly and honorably by fabulists and counterfeiters,” who provide “Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or even the Curiosity, of Government” (350). And sometimes it is, as it were, metaformal, aesthetic, legible in the effort to disassemble or derange that form—lovingly, honorably—into larger attunements. Here, then, is a keener angle of approach to those distensions and contractions of novelistic character for which we have seen Pynchon upbraided. These too, we might say, take their place among his untiring quarrels with a form to which he is also indebted and by which he is so many kinds of enchanted. The characters that emerge are in entangled, tense, nonreplicative relation to those traditions that most invest novelmade persons with the sorts of psychologized interiority whose absence Kakutani mourns. I don’t mean to say you cannot, therefore, read those fluctuations in styles of characterization as faulty or failing or in some register or other troublesome. With respect to Vineland’s Takeshi and to the way the styles of characterization that adhere to him are markedly at odds those attending to the white figures in his immediate vicinity, I have done just that. But I do think it wise to take up the matter of these detuned, denatured characters in a different key as well: as part of a disputative noncomplacency about just what it is form inherits. Even when it is a form that enables so much. Even, and perhaps especially, when it is a form we cherish.

We arrive here, I think, on some familiar terrain, and not only in the historical-formal and/or Jamesonian sense. I don’t imagine I’m the only person for whom a deep, sustaining devotion to certain sets of ideas and politics—a disposition for which “antihumanism” might be one plausible shorthand—rests with provoking uneasiness alongside these extravagances of attachment to poems, to novels, to forms even in their most traditional modes. The book before you, in its largest movements, has been tracing out one version of just such a dialectic, moving as it does from scenes of ordinary aesthetic captivation to a meditation on the enormous, supraindividual conjunctures of sedimented power that condition those scenes, invest and substantialize and delimit them. These are the contrary interlinked strains that give shape to the architecture of this book—behind and beneath which is the pressing intimation that we would do well to give no quarter in the direction of either of these commitments, however faltering that effort might prove to be. Reading Vineland, it has seemed to me, is one surprisingly effective way to remind yourself of what might be entailed, what losses might be sustained, in the diminishment of the one or of the other. You can locate such fractures as these in a number of idioms, just now, and in a number of conceptual precincts. Think, for instance, of the freighted volatility, in contemporary usage, of terms like “antihumanism” and, for that matter, “humanism,” which I’ve thrown around here in a somewhat offhand way. The briefest, most truncated tour through these conceptual idioms lays out some edifying conflicts and convergences. On the one hand, a basically poststructuralist antihumanism has of course been with us for some time (such that Eve Sedgwick, back in 1990, could refer without much explanatory flourish to “our indispensable antihumanist discourses” at the outset of Epistemology of the Closet) and has emphasized the nonsovereignty of the human subject in relation to its actuation in language, in political economy, in psychic economy, and so forth.9 Wedded to this, too, has been a differently calibrated, specifically anticolonial critique. Works as varied as those of Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Sylvia Wynter, and Walter Mignolo would be crucial here, especially as they take aim at the pretenses of a humanism built up upon the planetary ravages of Empire. In this rich and polyvocal archive, we find sustained consideration of the formative violence—the seizures of land and flesh—that made possible modernity’s vaunted exaltation of the human over the reign of Gods (often, as Jared Hickman notes, by transforming Euro-colonizers into gods, delivering life and death, salvation and damnation, as their will might dictate).10 Tiffany Lethabo King, in a 2019 book entitled The Black Shoals, offers a resonant phrase: she calls this “conquistador humanism.”11 Yet on the other side of this line of contention is not some flatly traditional, imperial-apologist position. Instead, one can find a consonant anticolonial commitment, prosecuted under the sign of what is often called “critical humanism,” by scholars like Abdul JanMohamed, Paul Gilroy,

and no less a figure in the archive of postcolonial critique than Edward Said, whose unwillingness to surrender the breadth of the humanist critical (and, indeed, novelistic) tradition to its narrowing into self-ratifying liberalism runs like a live current through all his work.12 (It is perhaps nowhere more vivid than in Humanism and Democratic Criticism.) These are the intellectual traditions that speak up, and are fortified, in Priyamvada Gopal’s Insurgent Empire, also from 2019, where she frames her work on the long histories of anti-imperial insurgency precisely in terms of a Saidian refusal to cede the ground of universalism to the imperialists who abuse it, making the case for “something like a refigured critical humanism.”13 Here, I would propose, is just one version of where we find ourselves. Let me say: my own first instinct, in the face of such expansive and enabling critical legacies as these, is not toward the hierarchizing adjudication among them, in rituals of legitimation and (or, often, through) delegitimation. Local imperatives, specific subsets of analytic questions, and my own affinities may, in a given instance, offer a kind of priority to one or another of these inflections of the critical tradition, but I take that to matter, at best, incidentally. I hope you can see why. For where we find ourselves conceptually is inevitably in relation to where we find ourselves, you could say, planetarily. Nothing about “the current conjuncture,” as the critical quarterlies say, seems liable to come into especially educative clarity in the terms of any single analytic idiom we might find lying near to hand. The rising tides of nonimaginary fascisms I mentioned earlier—the carceral nightmare, the planetary despoilment, the remaking of global polity on the model of liberal enfranchisement for the oligarchs, police state for all else, and so on and so on and so on— appears to me to mark out, at the very least, a moment of spectacular, spectacularly heterodox need. We might well disincline, inside such a moment, to relinquish any of our most vibrant and demanding critical traditions, whatever their fractious noncoincidence. Confronted with such fractiousness, the urgent matter, so far as my own battered political bearings can make out, might be to figure out how to make something usable and potent, something somehow nourishing, out of their sustained irresolution. And this, I suppose, is a thing I have come to cherish about Pynchon, even here, and even in these dire late days, and even in sight of the many unevennesses of a book like Vineland—which, in any case, it seems like I will forever just stupidly love anyway. I am thinking of the heartening way the ambitions we might think of as most broadly “humanist,” in Vineland but not only there, hold space with such measured grace with the kinds of political critique in which it is no less forcefully invested and with the kinds of refusal of humanism in its liberalized forms that follow from them. This is no mean trick, as most everything about our hard-to-conceptualize and rapidly collapsing present tense is always and everywhere reminding us. If Vineland is ongoingly wonderful to me it is not only for its hilarity, and not only for its ludicrous inventiveness, and not only for the acuity of its vision of neoliberalism as the age of total and ceaseless carceral counterinsurgency. I love these things, absolutely, and I have tried to redescribe them in ways that might make them lovable to you, too. But I am moved no less by Pynchon’s symphonic orchestration of these disharmonious strains—his conjuring of a world where laughter and outrage each circulate within the orbital pull of the other, to the diminishment of neither. Back, for one culminating example, to Vineland itself, and to its unsurrendered attachment to the promises and perhaps even the necessities of something akin to humanism, pursued in concert with a many-pronged assault on the forms of power, of seizure and captivation, for which that humanism is so often both mask and alibi. Because who should we find, there at another of the novel’s moments of payoff, in the midst of the Becker-Traverse family reunion, where so many of the kinds of political contention the novel delights in come jumblingly together? Who should come speaking up among these ranks of the unreconciled but goddamn Emerson, hoary hypercanonical uptight old Emerson? It was the heart of this gathering to honor the bond between Eula Becker and Jess Traverse, that lay beneath, defined, and made sense of them all, distributed from Marin to Seattle, Coos Bay to downtown Butte, choker setters and choppers, dynamiters of fish, shingle weavers and street-corner spellbinders, old and beaten at, young and brand-new, they all kept an eye on the head of the table, where Jess and Eula sat together, each year smaller and more transparent, waiting for Jess’s annual reading of a passage from Emerson he’d found and memorized years ago, quoted in a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience, by William James. Frail as the fog of Vineland, in his carrying, pure voice, Jess reminded them, “ ‘Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man or mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.’ ”

(369) It takes a good deal of scaffolding to transform even staid Bostonian Emerson into the voice of just this sort of undefeated radicalism and to enlist his earnest, sometimes unballasted optimism to the cause of anticapitalist struggle. Vineland is that scaffolding. For here is Jess Traverse, who read something once, and found it captivating, and galvanizing, and solidifying—and so, every year, he passes it on, memorized phrases from a long-ago speaker that turned up in a long-ago book, that now hearten the opposition to the tyrants and monopolists of the world. And that, at another scale, is a refracted vision of Vineland. So much of what you hear there—or of what I hope you now might hear in Pynchon’s thrown-off lark of a novel, his minor comic interlude in between epics—is the effort to sustain in their unresolving tension something like captivation and outrage, joyousness and horror, in a way that backs away from the power of neither. It is, as I’ve tried to suggest here by way of conclusion, a feat of conceptual alchemy we might find ourselves particularly energized by, just now. A novel is not a general strike, a highway blockade, a riot. No worthwhile framing of things like books or songs would forget that fact or think of them as anything other than a far, far more dispensable sort of object in the arsenal of political survival. They make nothing happen, as you know—though they may foment certain kinds of solidarity, make others conceivable, give heft to imaginings that strain at the seams of the possible. Or so, with Vineland to hand, I’ve tried to argue. “They might help you raise an army”—that, anyway, is what Michael Robbins suggests, with respect to those works that help “you to accept perpetual unrest, to arm yourself to confront perplexities.” They do so, he contends, by reminding you, at the least, “that you’re not alone.”14 This is not much, granted. But neither (he insisted) is it nothing. The nothing that it is not has been my subject in all the foregoing—that, and the needful, half-hapless gratitude that attends it. If you’ve come this far, I extend it to you as well.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Even a smallish book like this is the product of a lot of hands. I’m grateful for all the help I’ve gotten with it, in many forms and over many years. For making it happen at all, I’m thankful to Philip Leventhal, Jenny Davidson, the readers and staff at Columbia University Press, and especially to Nick Dames, who has been a reader both generative and hearteningly generous. Jordan Stein has proved once more the most acute and enabling of readers, and not only because he gave me a Lukács joke to steal (though I am grateful for that, too). Pamela Thurschwell, John Modern, and Davis Smith-Brecheisen have been ideal Pynchon interlocutors. Some long-ago bar talk with Joshua Clover was as important to my ability to think about this book, and about Pynchon, as the work of his that I so rely upon herein—which is to say, very goddamn important. As for the actual writing: Harris Feinsod, my Andersonville café compatriot, cheered me on with it morning after voluble summer morning. The work of it transpired in the midst of what was, privately, an exceedingly happy time, sheltered inside the enclosing terribleness of this spectacularly terrible era. Julie Orlemanski, with her singular radiance of mind and her singular generosities of heart, stands at the bright center of all that catalyzing joy. I don’t know that I have words for how grateful I am to that initial collection of friends (Jim Arndorfer, Laura Kepley, Enrique Ramirez, the original for Paul, whom we all still grieve) for teaching me what it might mean to cherish ephemeral things like books and bands and to find there resources for cherishing one another. In that vein: John Dorr and Mark Goble were wonderfully near to me (literally, digitally, virtually) in the making of all these sentences. I’ve shared a life with them for better than three decades now, so believe me when I say that, if anybody knows from counterfactual vehemence, life-enlarging talk, song recs, stupid jokes, and undimming love, it’s them.

NOTES

PROLOGUE: WHATEVER’S FAIR   1. I lift this cadence, and this opening, directly from an essay of Dave Hickey’s called “This Mortal Magic.” “When I was a kid and stupid about art,” he writes, “I used to love Cézanne because he made me feel smart.” Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues, 1997), 182.   2. “Zoyd needed cash and also some advice about a quick change of appearance, and both were available from the landscape contractor Zoyd did some lawn and tree work for, Millard Hobbs, a former actor who’d begun as a company logo and ended up as a majority owner of what’d been a modest enough lawn-care service its founder, a reader of forbidden books, had named The Marquis de Sod. Originally Millard had only been hired to be in a couple of locally produced late-night TV commercials in which, holding a giant bullwhip, he appeared in knee socks, buckle shoes, cutoff trousers, blouse, and platinum wig, all borrowed from his wife, Blodwen.” Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (New York: Penguin, 1990), 46. All quotations from the novel cited internally hereafter.   3. In the name of readerly companionability, I mean to keep the intrascholarly contention in this book to a minimum. But that’s not because I have not been provoked and edified and inspired by a great wealth of criticism. The briefest surveying of that enabling archive, some strands of which will appear in the pages that follow, would include: Molly Hite, Ideas of Order in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983); Leo Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” in The Culture of Redemption (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 179–99; Brian McHale, Constructing Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 1993); Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Grenier, and Larry McCaffrey, eds., The “Vineland” Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994), esp. the contributions by N. Katherine Hayles and Molly Hite; Stefan Mattessich, Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002); Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise, eds., Pynchon’s “Against the Day”: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2006); Casey Shoop, “Thomas Pynchon, Postmodernism, and the Rise of the New Right in California,” Contemporary Literature 53, no. 1 (2012): 51–86; Christopher Nealon, “Pynchon’s Children,” Public Books July 1, 2014, https://www.publicbooks.org/pynchons-children/; Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014); Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon: Politics After “Gravity’s Rainbow” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017).   4. This is from a brief essay whose chief topics are pleasure and Mason & Dixon, and it’s one of a few incidental pieces I’ve written over the years that turns to or reflects on Pynchon. Some reconfigured lines of thought and contention from these essays and a few reworked passages will reappear in the work that follows, where I have looked to clarify, expand, and synthesize those more occasional pieces. They are “Alone and in Company: Some Pleasures of the Text,” J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists 1, no. 1 (Spring 2013): 6–14; “Talk, Talk,” Frieze 148 (June–July–August 2012): 23–24; and “How to Do Things with Joy,” theory@buffalo 12 (2008): 61–85.   5. Thomas Pynchon, introduction to Slow Learner (New York: Little, Brown, 1984), xix.   6. One guiding example to me for this mode of approach—which is especially salient inasmuch as the work of this book will turn to the upheavals of ’68 and Vineland’s quality of address to them—is Lauren Berlant’s “’68, or Something,” Critical Inquiry 21, no. 1 (1994): 124–55.   7. Salman Rushdie, “Still Crazy After All These Years: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon,” New York Times Book Review, January 14, 1990, 1, 36–37.

1. THE GREAT SOUTH COAST PLAZA EYESHADOW RAID (’94)   1. See, paradigmatically, the section called “Reconsidering Vineland” in the introduction to Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon: Politics After “Gravity’s Rainbow” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 3–8. Vineland appears prominently throughout the fine work collected in Scott McClintock and John Miller, eds., Pynchon’s California (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014).   2. Vinland the Good is a book from 1946, in which the British author Nevil Shute tells the story of Lief Ericson’s putative “discovery” of America.   3. Zadie Smith, White Teeth (New York: Vintage, 2000), 31–32.   4. Thomas Pynchon, introduction to Slow Learner (New York: Little, Brown, 1984), xxxiii.   5. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966; New York: HarperPerennial, 1999), 52.   6. Karen Tongson, Relocations: Queer Suburban Imaginaries (New York: New York University Press, 2011), 23–24. She inherits the term “remote intimacy” from Jennifer Terry.   7. Some strong resources for thinking about publicness can be found in John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems: An Essay in Political Inquiry (1927; Chicago: Gateway, 1946), 27; Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, ed. Peter Connor, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simon Sawhney (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991); and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone, 2002).   8. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Queer and Now,” in Tendencies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 16.   9. “We are thus assisted,” Emerson writes in Nature, “by natural objects in the expression of particular meanings. But how great a language to convey such pepper-corn informations! Did it need such a noble race of creatures, this profusion of forms, this host of orbs in heaven, to furnish man with the dictionary and grammar of his municipal speech? Whilst we use this grand cipher to expedite the affairs of our pot and kettle, we feel that we have not yet put it to its use, neither are able.” Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Richard Poirier (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 16. See also Richard Poirier’s strong readings of Emerson in The Renewal of Literature (New York: Random House, 1987). 10. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 205–6. 11. Emerson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, 208, 211. 12. N. Katherine Hayles, “ ‘Who Was Saved?’: Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland,” in The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Grenier, and Larry McCaffrey (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 14–30. 13. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues, 1997), 207. 14. Christopher Nealon, “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism,” American Literature 76, no. 3 (2004): 578–602, 597–98. 15. Lester Bangs, Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung (New York: Vintage, 1988), 239.

2. THEY WOKE, THE THANATOIDS AWOKE (’02)   1. Dave Hickey, Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy (Los Angeles: Art Issues, 1997), 101.   2. Henry Veggian, “Profane Ilumminations: Postmodernism, Realism, and the Holytail Marijuana Crop in Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland,” in Pynchon’s California, ed. Scott McClintock and John Miller (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014), 136.   3. Veggian’s reading tracks alongside, and is offered in relation to, N. Katherine Hayles’s early reading of the novel’s counterposing what she calls “the kinship system” to “the snitch system”—though their conclusions are, I think, consequentially different. For Hayles, Pynchon’s praise for the kinship system means that “if salvation comes, it will arrive by cherishing the small everyday acts of kindness that flourish in networks of kinship and friendship”—a conclusion that, Veggian’s account might suggest, downplays both the salience of political-economic structure in its tuning of scale to the small and everyday as well as the novel’s unforesworn interest in wider solidarities made in commitment to an opposition, not necessarily nonviolent, to the power of the state. See “ ‘Who Was Saved?’: Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland,” in The “Vineland” Papers: Critical Takes

on Pynchon’s Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Grenier, and Larry McCaffrey (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 14–30, 15, 28.   4. David Cowart, “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland,” in The “Vineland” Papers, 3–13, 8. I am singling out this critic here, but, in fairness, he is giving voice to what was for quite some time a consensus position.   5. It is perhaps worth noting that Pynchon plays up and down the keyboard of “the joke” as formal property and rhetorical mode, leaning at some moments on the elaborate mechanics of set-up, punchline, and detournement, at others on the slapstick or the silly, at still others on the comic reference (see again “the indispensable Italian Wedding Fakebook, by Deleuze & Guattari”), and also, for good measure, on metaformal maneuvers, like the Star Wars mapping of the novel as a whole. This proliferation of styles and modes with respect to the joke makes references to Pynchon as, say, an “ironist”—often in concert with an appraisal of his postmodernity—feel to me a little flattening. On the workings of the joke as both reference and form, I’m grateful to Nicholas Dames for clarifying conversation.   6. Pynchon’s roving and nondismissive quarrel with form and with the inheritances of the novelistic tradition will be the subject of chapter 4.   7. Scott McClintock, for instance, does excellent work on “the symbiosis of the hard-boiled detective genre and the sentimental expression of feeling,” with the examples of Inherent Vice and Vineland before him. See his “The Origins of the Family, Private Property, and the State of California in Pynchon’s Fiction,” in Pynchon’s California, 101.

3. SCABLAND GARRISON STATE (’08)   1. Murder Mountain, dir. Joshua Zeman (Netflix, 2018).   2. For more on the workings, structures, and tactics of COINTELPRO—an important entity in Vineland—see David Cunningham, There’s Something Happening Here: The New Left, the Klan, and FBI Counterintelligence (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).   3. See https://oag.ca.gov/bi/camp.   4. The archive of neoliberal critique is by now vast, but for an excellent primer on the argot of neoliberalism, its spectacularly self-exposing efforts of lexical self-masking, see John Pat Leary, Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (Chicago: Haymarket, 2019).   5. Sean Carswell, Occupy Pynchon: Politics After “Gravity’s Rainbow” (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 7.   6. This is from Carswell’s summary of Sascha Pöhlmann’s work and its contention that, however aptly Gravity’s Rainbow defined “postmodernism in literature,” his later works “move beyond the theory and its constructs” (6).   7. See Christopher Nealon, “Pynchon’s Children,” Public Books, July 1, 2014, https://www.publicbooks.org/pynchons-children/.   8. One touchstone account of neoliberalism and securitization, from which I’m borrowing here and throughout, is Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collége de France, 1977–78, ed. Michel Sennellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador, 2009).   9. On one aspect of that carceral fanaticism, with special attention to the leveraging of a rhetoric of “safety,” see Christina B. Hanhardt, Safe Space: Gay Neighborhood History and the Politics of Violence (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013). 10. W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 117. For a broader overview of the period, see also Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam, 1987). 11. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 118. 12. Bill Van Niekerken, “1967 Vietnam War Protest Photos Show Savagery by Police in Oakland,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 7, 2017, https://www .sfchronicle.com/chronicle_vault/article/1967-Vietnam-War-protest-photos-show-savagery-by-12338190.php. See also writing from the SDS/SNCC organ The Movement, especially the issue from November 27, 1967, archived at https://libraries.ucsd.edu/farmworkermovement/ufwarchives/sncc/27November%201967.pdf. That issue was headlined “THE DAYS WE SEIZED THE STREETS IN OAKLAND.” 13. See, on these questions, Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), esp. 151–56; and, in a different key than Freer’s critique, Molly Hite, “Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland,” in The “Vineland” Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Grenier, and Larry McCaffrey (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 135–53. 14. Joshua Clover, “Three Underground,” Popula, January 9, 2019, https://popula.com/2019/01/09/three-underground/. 15. “I was free for an hour and a half,” he would add, “because during that time the repressive forces couldn’t put their hand on me because we were shooting it out with them for an hour and a half.” See Cleaver’s interview with Henry Louis Gates Jr., archived at: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages /frontline/shows/race/interviews/ecleaver.html. 16. Joshua Clover, “Workers Leaving the Factory: From May 69 to October 05,” posted on the Verso blog, May 3, 2018, https://www.versobooks.com/blogs /3781-workers-leaving-the-factory-from-may-68-to-october-05. This essay is his preface to the French edition of his 2016 book Riot Strike Riot. “Here,” Clover continues, encapsulating the argument of Riot Strike Riot, “the gap between proletariat and working class, which had for near on two centuries drawn closer such that we began to treat the categories as identical, begins to open again. And the riot, which had surrendered pride of place within the repertoire of collective action but surely never gone away, reasserts itself.” 17. Clover, “Workers Leaving the Factory.” 18. For my money, it is Gilmore—more than Hardt and Negri, more than Harvey, more even than Jameson—who pairs best with the Pynchon who dreams in Californian. See Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). Another worthwhile text in this critical archive—which appeared after the drafting of this chapter but is absolutely salient—is Stuart Schrader, Badges Without Borders: How Global Counterinsurgency Transformed American Policing (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). 19. Clover, “Three Underground.” 20. Carswell, Occupy Pynchon, 39, contends that the novel “presents violent resistance to Empire as futile and lacking in both historical knowledge and critical thought.” 21. Victory Navasky and Christopher Cerf, “Who Said the Iraq War Would Pay for Itself? They Did!,” The Nation, March 13, 2008, https://www.thenation.com /article/who-said-war-would-pay-itself-they-did/. 22. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 160, 161, 161. 23. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 163. 24. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War, 162. 25. Andrew Goff, “Humboldt County’s SWAT Team Spent Last Week Learning New Tricks,” September 12, 2018, https://lostcoastoutpost.com/2018/sep/12 /humboldt-countys-swat-team-spent-last-week-learnin/. 26. See the Urban Shield website: https://www.urbanshield.org/swat.html. 27. Phil Matier, “The Police Training Exercise Called Urban Shield Has Funding Pulled, so It’s Over for Good,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 26, 2019, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/philmatier/article/The-police-training-exercise-called-Urban-Shield-13718834.php.

4. SECRET RETRIBUTIONS (’19—…)   1. “Relax, have fun,” the novel has DL tell herself as she parades onstage among other women awaiting selection by men gathered in the dark. “She smiled even with her eyes … alert now at nipples and clitoris, the price being bid upward deliriously” (137).   2. Molly Hite, “Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland,” in The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, Donald J. Grenier, and Larry McCaffrey (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1994), 135–53.   3. Joanna Freer, Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 156. Freer in this way “take[s] issue with Jeffrey Sever’s contention that Pynchon’s career shows a forward progression in its depiction of women” (155).   4. Toni Morrison, “This Amazing, Troubling Book,” in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: An Authoritative Text; Contexts and Sources; Criticism, ed. Thomas Cooley (1996; New York: Norton, 1999), 386.   5. Michiko Kakutani, “A Pynchonesque Turn by Pynchon,” New York Times, November 6, 2006.   6. For a fine recent estimation of the “flattened” characters of early fiction, one that contests without dismissing Deidre Shauna Lynch’s important The Economy of Character, see David Diamond, “Secular Fielding,” ELH 85, no. 3 (2018): 691–714.   7. Alex Woloch, The One Vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003); for a more recent survey, see Jill Galvan, “Character,” Victorian Literature and Culture 46, no. 3–4 (2018): 612–16. For a bracingly contrary account of character that disputes several versions of the thesis that “character individuates,” see Aaron Kunin, Character as Form (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 8.   8. Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (New York: Picador, 1997), 350–51. Cited internally hereafter.

  9. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 24. 10. See Walter D. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000); Michel-Rolph Troiullot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Reproduction of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995); Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origins of the Americas, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Scholarly Press, 1995), 5–57; Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017). See, for a powerful related strand of such work, the scholarship collected in the “Queer Inhumanisms” special issue of GLQ, edited by Mel Chen and Dana Luciano, GLQ 21, no. 2–3 (2015). 11. Tiffany Lethabo King, The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 16. 12. See Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd, “Toward a Theory of Minority Discourse,” introduction to Cultural Critique 6 (Spring 1987): 5–12; Paul Gilroy, Darker Than Blue: On the Moral Economies of Black Atlantic Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010); and Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). For an older, more critical surveying of this tradition, see Paul Bové, Intellectuals in Power: A Genealogy of Critical Humanism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986). 13. Priyamvada Gopal, Insurgent Empire: Anticolonial Resistance and British Dissent (New York: Verso, 2019), 23. 14. Michael Robbins, “Equipment for Living: Poetry’s Complex Consolations,” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/70208/equipmentfor-living.

INDEX

Page numbers refer to the print edition but are hyperlinked to the appropriate location in the e-book. Against the Day (Pynchon), 3, 15, 32, 109–11 antihumanism, 117–23 Arendt, Hannah, 28–29 Baez, Joan, 78 Balzac, Honoré de, 47 Bangs, Lester, 35–36 Bardacke, Frank, 78 Benjamin, Walter, 94 Berkeley protests (1960s), 76–77, 81, 99–101 Black Panther Party, 81 Black Shoals, The (King), 119 Bloody Sunday attacks (1965), 79 Bourdieu, Pierre, 31 Brown, Wendy, 72 Campaign Against Marijuana Production (CAMP), 70–71, 83–84 carceral counterinsurgency, 8–10, 72–75, 80–85, 107–9. See also Murder Mountain (2018 documentary) Carswell, Sean, 71–72, 94 characters and character making, 109–17 Chavez, Cesar, 81 Chicago protests (1968), 81, 107–8 Cleaver, Eldridge, 81 Clover, Joshua, 80, 81–83, 84, 92–94, 107 COINTELPRO, 71, 83–84, 102 Crying of Lot 49, The (Pynchon), 24, 32, 95 DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration), 83–84 Department of Justice, 83–84 Detroit uprising (1968), 79, 83, 107–8 Dewey, John, 28–29 Dickens, Charles, 111–13 Duggan, Lisa, 72 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 29–31 Empire Strikes Back, The (film), 47 Epistemology of the Closet (Sedgwick), 118 Faulkner, William, 26 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 70–71, 83–84 France, 82–83 Frankfurt School, 33–34 Freer, Joanna, 105 Gaulle, Charles de, 82–83 gender, 80, 104–5 Gilmore, Ruth Wilson, 84 Gilroy, Paul, 119 Golden Gulag (Gilmore), 84 Gopal, Priyamvada, 119 Gravity’s Rainbow (Pynchon), 3, 48, 133n6 Hardt, Michael, 72 Harvey, David, 72 Hayles, N. Katherine, 32, 131n3 Heritage Foundation, 101 Hickey, Dave, 33, 41, 127n1 Hickman, Jared, 119 Hite, Molly, 104–5 Homeland Security, 101–2 Huckleberry Finn (Twain), 107

Huerta, Dolores, 81 humanism, 118–23 Humanism and Democratic Criticism (Said), 119 idiolects, 7–8, 26–37, 60–65, 121–22 Inherent Vice (Pynchon), 3, 15 Insurgent Empire (Gopal), 119 James, Henry, 20 Jameson, Fredric, 72 JanMohamed, Abdul, 119 jokes, 45–46, 52, 106–7, 131–32n5 jouissance, 35 joy, 5–6, 25–27, 33–35 Kakutani, Michiko, 109–11, 112, 113 Kent State shootings, 100 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 78, 81 King, Tiffany Lethabo, 119 Lolita (Nabokov), 49 Lost Coast Outpost (website), 101–2 Lowell, Robert, 109 Lukács, Georg, 42–44, 47 marijuana, 69–71 Mason & Dixon (Pynchon), 3, 15, 60–61, 113–17 Massu, Jacques, 83 McClintock, Scott, 132n7 Meese, Edwin, 100–101 Mignolo, Walter, 118–19 militarized policing, 8–10, 72–75, 80–85, 107–9. See also Murder Mountain (2018 documentary) Milwaukee uprising, 79 Morrison, Toni, 107 Murder Mountain (documentary), 69–70, 71, 73–74, 101 Nabokov, Vladimir, 49 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 28 Nealon, Christopher, 33–34, 72 Negri, Antonio, 72 neoliberalism: perpetual counterinsurgency and, 8–10, 72–75, 80–85, 96–103, 107–9; use of term, 71–73; views of the sixties and, 72–83, 85–96. See also Murder Mountain (2018 documentary) Newark uprising, 79 Newton, Huey, 81 novel and novelistic representation, 109–17 Oakland protests, 77–78, 81, 107–8 Occupy Pynchon (Carswell), 71–72 O’Hara, Frank, 37 Paris, 83 Peasants, The (Balzac), 47 Phillips, Adam, 61 poetry, 30–31, 33–34 Pöhlmann, Sascha, 133n6 police. See militarized policing postmodernism, 56, 72, 113, 116 poststructuralism, 118 public sphere, 28–37, 91 Pynchon, Thomas: classical realism and, 42–44; fascination with counterhegemonic collectivities and, 32; genre mash-up and, 38; novelistic representation and character making by, 109–17; postmodernism and, 56, 72, 113, 116; “sentimental” turn and, 57. See also Vineland (Pynchon); specific novels race and “race riots,” 79, 107–8 Reagan, Ronald, 100 realism, 42–44 Rector, James, 99–100 Return of the Jedi (film), 45–46 Robbins, Michael, 123 Rorabaugh, W. J., 78, 99–101 Rumsfeld, Donald J., 97–99 Rushdie, Salman, 8 Said, Edward, 119 San Francisco Chronicle (newspaper), 79 Seale, Bobby, 81 securitization, 8–10, 72–75, 80–85, 107–9. See also Murder Mountain (documentary)

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 29–31, 118 Seine-Saint-Denis, 83 Selma to Montgomery marches, 79 sexual violence, 104–5 Shute, Nevil, 129n2 Slow Learner (Pynchon), 24 Smith, Zadie, 19–20 state murder, 38–42, 63, 72, 79–80 Stop the Draft Week protests, 77–79 storytelling, 59–60 Terry, Jennifer, 129n6 Third World Liberation Front, 81 “Three Underground” (Clover), 92–94 Tongson, Karen, 26 Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, 118–19 Twain, Mark, 107 United Farm Workers, 81 Urban Shield, 101–2 Veggian, Henry, 42–44, 47, 52–53 Vineland (Pynchon): adult professionals as readers, 102–3; antihumanism and, 117–23; Asian fetishization in, 105–7; collectivities of readers and, 7–8, 26– 37; disposition of, 56–60; language(s) and, 7–8, 26–37, 60–65; mistrust of policing agencies in, 69–71; model of perpetual counterinsurgency in, 72–75, 80–85, 96–103, 107–9; narrative voice of, 23; ordinary American speech in, 23–24; plot of, 16–18; as political and historical novel, 8–11, 42–49, 52–53; political grief in, 10, 75, 86, 94; political-aesthetic critique of, 104–9; publication and reception of, 3–4, 15; role of sentence in, 49–53; setting of, 53–56; as spectacularly funny, 1–7, 43–49; state murder in, 38–42, 63, 72, 79–80; strains of mournfulness in, 17–18, 24–25; view of the sixties in, 72–83, 85–96; women in, 80, 104–5; young readers and, 18–27, 34–37, 53 Vinland the Good (Shute), 129n2 War on Terror, 75 Waters, Chris, 70, 101 Watts, 107–8 Weather Underground, 81 White Teeth (Smith), 19–20 Woloch, Alex, 112–13 Wynter, Sylvia, 118–19