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A Deculturated Pynchon? Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and Reading In

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A Deculturated Pynchon? Thomas Pynchon's Vineland and Reading In A Deculturated Pynchon? Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and Reading in the Age of Television Tobias Meinel ABSTRACT This essay examines Thomas Pynchon’s novel Vineland as a take on reading in the 1980s. Vineland’s suffusion with popular culture and television references has led many critics to focus on its shift in style and content and to read it either as “Pynchon Lite” or as a critical commen- tary on contemporary American culture. Few critics, however, have picked up on Pynchon’s sus- tained concern with creating reader-character parallels. Through the figure of Prairie Wheeler, Vineland presents us, I argue, with a sophisticated allegory about the entrapments of superficial reading. Representing what Judith Fetterley has termed the “resisting reader,” Prairie guides us through the 1980s Culture Wars in which reading had become a political issue. Under its sur- face, then, Vineland appears as a highly self-reflective novel that complicates cause and effect in contemporary discussions about reading, mass culture, and television. When Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland was published in 1990, the novel’s apparent difference from its predecessor Gravity’s Rainbow in style, content, and scope led to puzzled reactions. Was this what Pynchon had been working on for seventeen years? Was it a “breather between biggies,” as one critic suspected (Leonard 281)? Or did the novel’s infusion with popular culture simply constitute a lesser novel, a “Pynchon Lite” (Kakutani)? On the one hand, the story of aging hippie Zoyd Wheeler and his teenage daughter Prairie, who are looking for Zoyd’s ex-wife (and Prarie’s mother) Frenesi, a former Sixties radical who turned against her friends and ran away with federal prosecutor and bad guy Brock Vond, seemed much “more manageable” than the plot of Gravity’s Rainbow, as one critic put it (qtd. in Keesey 108). On the other hand, many critics simply felt let down: Frank Kermode called it “a disappointing book” (3), John Leonard observed that it did not “feel like something obsessed-about and fine-tuned for the seventeen years since Gravity’s Rainbow” (281), and David Cowart felt that Pynchon had “made no effort to surpass Gravity’s Rainbow” (67).1 Accordingly, such critics hailed 1 There were, however, also more positive reviews. Salman Rushdie, for example, called Vineland “a major political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years,” and Richard Powers considered the novel “a return […] to a more traditional novel” and a “burlesque but deeply engaged fairy tale” (694, 697). Both Rushdie’s and Powers’s reviews indicated which direction Vineland criticism would take. Recovering from the discovery that Vineland was not Gravity’s Rainbow, Part II, critics focused more closely on the novel’s politics (see Booker) or its shift in aesthetics (see Conner) and often came to consider Vineland as a companion text to The Crying of Lot 49. Thomas Schaub, for example, notes that the two “form a pair: [The Crying of Lot 49] shows the consciousness-raising of a housewife in the 1960s, 452 Tobias Meinel Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon as a return to form and cemented into place Vineland’s status as intermediary text. What is overlooked in such an evalu- ation of Vineland is that the novel shows Pynchon’s continued effort to reflect and comment on contemporary reading issues. Pynchon’s novels, as Edward Mendelson rightly argued in 1976, “implicate their readers in the processes they describe” (“Gravity’s” 187). The setting of each novel reflects the specific reading environment around the time of their publica- tion, and we as readers essentially mirror the quest of the characters. The textual form of Gravity’s Rainbow, for example, put us right alongside its protagonists into the ‘Zone’ and made us experience key issues of 1970s critical theory: unde- cidability, confusion, fragmentation, and ambiguity. All of Pynchon’s novels fulfill this important dual function: they not only reflect contemporary reading prac- tices, but also lure their readers into imitating the very practices that the novels describe. This process recalls what Louis Althusser has described as interpella- tion. Althusser’s description of interpellation as a “Hey, you there” through which ideology “‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals […] or ‘transforms’ the indi- viduals into subjects” finds an analogy in the way Pynchon’s novels position their readers in specific roles (174). By luring their readers into certain ways of reading and by explicitly thematizing reading, Pynchon’s novels function not only as re- flections of dominant reading anxieties but also as interventions. Instead of re- flecting the zeitgeist in the sense of merely representing and reiterating the status quo, Pynchon’s novels disrupt predominant reading practices by forcing us to take a step back and examine our own goals, strategies, and motivations in reading. A key to moving beyond Vineland’s deceptive simplicity therefore lies in con- sidering Pynchon’s preoccupation with reading and readers, including viewing and viewers. It is important to note that in critical theory of the decade, ‘reading’ comes increasingly to designate activities other than just reading, for example in the introduction to Sara Mills’s collection Gendering the Reader, in which she conflates reading, viewing, and listening (1). Accordingly, it is a central aspect of Vineland that we find most of its characters engaged in viewing rather than reading. The novel depicts a society deeply permeated by pop culture and televi- sion: TV addicts have to go into rehab and large parts of society have turned into mindless consumers. Moreover, the form of the novel itself is reminiscent of TV’s editing style.2 It portrays, in short, exactly the kind of nightmare that had many while [Vineland] serves as a coda to the 1960s from the standpoint of Reagan’s America in the 1980s” (3). For similar evaluations of Vineland, see also Bergh, and Kakutani. 2 Vineland’s structure recalls, for example, what Kate Moody describes in her Growing Up on Television: “Television’s most successful techniques—short segments, fast action, quick cuts, fades, dissolves—break time into perceptual bits” (qtd. in Lazere 288). Chapter four in Vine- land illustrates this: it opens with Zoyd driving to meet two friends. After a quick flashback to Zoyd’s initial encounter with them, there is another flashback to Zoyd’s childhood. Fast forward to Zoyd and Frenesi’s wedding and further on to a breakfast conversation with Prairie. Back in present time, Zoyd has arrived at his friends’ place. After a flashback to a conversation with another friend, we follow Zoyd delivering crawfish in Vineland County. Before he meets Prairie and Hector at a local Pizza parlor, there is a comical aside to a landscape contractor calling him- self “The Marquis de Sod”—which corresponds to television’s ubiquitous commercial breaks. A Deculturated Pynchon? 453 cultural critics and commentators up in arms. What Evan Brier described as “a newly perceived culture crisis in the 1980s” and “the perceived decline of the cul- tural authority of literature” contributed to the heated discussions of the Culture Wars of the decade (238). Arguing about curricula, multiculturalism, education, and reading, observers on both left and right saw signs of malaise everywhere: “Americans are not regular readers [anymore],” worried Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post; in Who Reads Literature? The Future of the United States as a Nation of Readers, Nicholas Zill and Marianne Winglee concluded that “there is little doubt that the advent of television has had profound effects on our cultural life” (79); and Armando Petrucci voiced fears about televison and zapping turning us into “deculturated readers” (362). Such comments are echoed in the negative reactions to Vineland as a ‘deculturated Pynchon.’ Vineland, I argue, deliberately lures its readers into such premature comments about its style and content. It thus constitutes Pynchon’s participation in the Culture Wars: if Vineland appears on the surface as a nostalgic elegy for the Sixties, a critique of contemporary culture and Reaganite America, or a story of regeneration and renewal (depending on which critic we read), the novel, I suggest, presents beneath the surface a comment on contemporary reading anxieties and a sophisticated allegory on the entrap- ments of superficial readings. Viewers, Readers, and Reading Anxieties Vineland, then, is different from its predecessors because it describes an entirely new environment and with it a new set of reading anxieties. The 1980s reading scene constitutes—to borrow a term from Judith Chambers’s book on Pynchon—a “reconfigured world” (185). Vineland is, as Chambers rightly argues, “radically different” from Gravity’s Rainbow because it “addresses [this] recon- figuration” (185). If ‘paranoia’ and ‘death’ are keywords in Gravity’s Rainbow, comparable to ‘inanimate’ in V. and ‘revelation’ in The Crying of Lot 49, a keyword in Vine- land is ‘the Tube’ with a capital T. The world of Vineland is populated by viewers rather than readers and filmmakers instead of writers. If Herbert Stencil, Oedipa Maas, and Tyrone Slothrop were representative of the reading anxieties of the 1960s and 1970s, we find the representatives of 1980s concerns in TV junkie Hec- tor Zuñiga and raised-on-television Prairie, who only knows the Sixties through “fast clips on the Tube” (Vineland 198). Just as television permeates the lives of all major characters, the novel is suffused with references to movies, television hosts and characters, game shows, and sitcoms. Instead of references to Emily Dickinson or Rainer Maria Rilke as in Gravity’s Rainbow, we come across The Brady Bunch and Mr. Spock. The sheer mass of such allusions demonstrates how deeply television has come to influence the lives of Vineland’s protagonists.
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