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. The Tube replaces the after-sex cigarette (for Brock and Frenesi) and provides a work

Other chapters are equally or even more episodic, switching, in the style of soap operas or sit- coms, between different focal characters (see, for example, chapter twelve). 454 Tobias Meinel atmosphere (for the members of the revolutionary film collective 24fps), company (for Frenesi’s old friend DL), someone to talk to (for Frenesi’s father), and a 24-7 distraction (for Mucho Mass of The Crying of Lot 49, who makes a cameo).3 Even the Traverses, the “old, proud, and strong union people” (320), cannot resist: dur- ing their family reunion in the last chapter of the novel, the Tube is always on. The ubiquity of television is also made clear in narrative comments such as “It was just before prime time” (194); television has even come to dominate our sense of time. The effects of the massive consumption can be seen in the fact that several char- acters’ perceptions of reality have changed. When Takeshi and DL, for example, tell their story in chapter nine, one of their listeners perceives the story as a sitcom and makes “a point to laugh about it a lot, trying to fill in for a live studio audi- ence” (179). Similarly, for Frenesi’s son Justin, an argument between his parents becomes a version of Space Invaders (not quite TV, but close enough): his father “launched complaints of different sizes at different speeds and Frenesi tried to deflect or neutralize them before her own defenses gave way” (87). Apart from the mysterious Thanatoids—surreal beings, somewhere between living and dead, who live in a village near Vineland and who “spent at least part of every waking hour with an eye on the Tube” (170-71)—the most immediate incar- nation of the couch potato and the embodiment of fears about the negative effects of television is, ironically, a DEA agent addicted to the Tube: Hector Zuñiga. For him, television has completely overtaken reality. He has adopted the lingo of cop shows, hums TV theme songs, consumes television like a drug, and is eventually checked into a “Tubaldetox” facility, where he “[creeps] out of his ward at night to lurk anywhere Tubes might be glowing, to bathe in rays, lap and suck at the flow of image” (335). A recurring motif in Vineland is the application of the terminology of addiction and drug use to television. Not only are there Tubal rehab centers, we also read about characters who are tubed out or have overdosed on television (cf. 53, 336). Television has literally become the opiate of the masses—an opiate that is sanctioned and tolerated by the government and thus exempt from Rea- gan’s War on Drugs. The notion of TV as a government-sanctioned opiate is also reflected in another character’s take on the Tube: Mucho Maas’s view—although he has completely given in to the temptations of television and money—echoes not only a Slothropian notion of ‘Them,’ but also resembles convictions of 1980s liberals and conservatives that television is controlled by their respective politi- cal opponents. Some conservatives, such as political commentator Kevin Phillips, suspected that television was controlled by a left-leaning intelligentsia. Liberals, by contrast, feared government control through television—a fear shared by Pyn- chon’s character Mucho: “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” (314). The notion of television as a ‘stupefying device’ also comes up in an argument at the Traverse-Becker fam- ily reunion in the last chapter. The Traverses—who have, as Against the Day will later reveal, fought the Man for generations—discuss the stupefying and illusion-

3 See pages 212, 197, 141, 288, and 308, respectively. A Deculturated Pynchon? 455 creating force of television and its connection with what they consider fascist ten- dencies in America. At their family reunion, grandfolks could be heard arguing the perennial question of whether the United States still lingered in a prefascist twilight, or whether that darkness had fallen long stupefied years ago, and the light they thought they saw was coming only from millions of Tubes all showing the same bright-colored shadows. (Vineland 371). Only two pages later, Prairie’s boyfriend Isaiah puts it even more bluntly when he blames the failure of the Sixties revolution on the inability of those involved to understand and thus withstand television: “Minute the Tube got hold of you folks that was it, that whole alternative America, el deado meato, just like th’ Indians, sold it all to your real enemies, and even in 1970s dollars—it was way too cheap” (373). Vineland’s preoccupation with television thus quite obviously reflects discus- sions of the Culture Wars of the 1980s. While conservative culture war ‘classics,’ such as William J. Bennett’s To Reclaim a Legacy, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, or Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals, mainly focused on lib- eral education, multiculturalism, and the legacy of 1960s activism in their search for a scapegoat for a perceived decline in national culture, it was clear that televi- sion was often seen as the degenerate offspring of liberal politics.4 Many liber- als, at the same time, feared that television would turn viewers into unthinking and gullible couch potatoes who are easy to indoctrinate and too slow-minded to imagine anything other than the status quo (see Donald Lazere’s “Literacy and Mass Media”). The fear that readers were increasingly transforming into viewers was therefore common to critics on both ends of the political spectrum. The connection between debates about television and reading becomes clear, for example, in Armando Petrucci’s “Reading to Read: A Future for Reading” and Donald Lazere’s “Literacy and Mass Media: The Political Implications.” Pe- trucci’s chapter in Cavallo and Chartier’s A History of Reading in the West shows an intellectual’s concern about undifferentiated mass reading and “deculturated readers” (362). His description of the ‘new mass readers’ essentially repeats the 1950s debate about highbrow, middlebrow, and lowbrow culture, but presents ad- ditional concerns about the growth of television culture. Reading, Petrucci notes, has ceased to be the main means of acculturation. “In mass culture,” he argues, “it has been undermined by television,” and reading practices have necessarily been influenced by these new modes of acquisition of knowledge (361). The habit of zapping has created “potential readers who not only know no ‘canon’ or ‘order of reading’, but have not acquired the respect, traditional in book readers, for the order of the text” (362). Petrucci’s argument is typical for a traditionalist or

4 Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind provides a good example of a conserva- tive take on MTV: “Picture a thirteen-year-old boy […] wearing his Walkman headphones or watching MTV. He enjoys the liberties hard won over centuries by the alliance of philosophic genius and political heroism […]. And in what does progress culminate? A pubescent child whose body throbs with orgasmic rhythms; whose feelings are made articulate in hymns to the joys of onanism or the killing of parents; whose ambition is to win fame and wealth in imitating the drag-queen who makes the music. In short, life is made into a non-stop, commercially pre- packaged masturbational fantasy” (74-75). 456 Tobias Meinel conservative concern about the influence of television and could be compared, for example, to Allan Bloom’s contention in The Closing of the American Mind that students “had lost the practice of and the taste for reading” (62). In the view of many conservative Culture Warriors it was up to a new conservatism to restore education and with it a taste for reading. On the other end of the political spectrum, Lazere’s article in Cathy N. Da- vidson’s 1989 collection Reading in America is a good example of leftist concerns about the negative effects of mass media in general, and of television in partic- ular. Lazere’s point is that television—because of its low “literacy level” (289),5 because of the “absence of the analytic and synthetic modes of reasoning” in its content (291), and because of its restricted linguistic code and its limiting impact on the audience’s imagination—not only dumbs down the audience but also has profound political implications in that it leads to inertia and an unquestioning ac- ceptance of the status quo. In arguing that this “media-induced illiteracy” leads to predominantly conservative attitudes (289), Lazere counters arguments about a liberal bias in American media put forth by many neoconservative critics. While he does not argue that higher education or improved cognitive abilities would automatically lead to liberal beliefs, Lazere feels that “higher education, elabo- rate language codes” (300), as well as complex cognitive patterns promoted by literature would be a remedy against the “impoverished, powerless mentality in millions of people” (299). Lazere thus sees his argument as “a powerful reaffirma- tion of the value of literary study at all levels of education for promoting cognitive development and critical thinking” (287). Television may turn the audience into passive, apolitical (or conservative) couch potatoes, but reading can save us. Zuñiga and the Thanatoids, then, are caricatures of the anxieties shared by Pe- trucci, Bloom, and Lazere. Vineland not only echoes contemporaneous concerns and confronts its readers with an overdose of TV and pop culture but also trig- gers a calculated critical reaction. What Mendelson noted about Gravity’s Rain- bow—that it “prophesies not only Western history between the time of its action and the time of its publication, but also its own history, the history of its own re- ception” (“Gravity’s” 177-78)—also holds true for Vineland. The comments made about Vineland were quite often strikingly similar to the anxious comments about television. Early commentators did not quite know what to do with the novel. Did Vineland constitute a ‘deculturated’ Pynchon or was it as a critique of contempo- rary culture and of what Jonathan Franzen has called “the banal ascendancy of television” (58)? Joseph W. Slade, for example, suspected that Vineland “may be too trendy” for some readers and believed the allusions to television and popular culture “numerous enough to turn off academic audiences” (126), and Paul Gray noted that it is “admittedly, disquieting to find a major author drawing cultural sus- tenance from The Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy instead of The Odyssey and the Bible.” Cowart’s review oscillated between both poles (deculturated Pynchon vs.

5 Lazere’s TV consumer has cognitive deficiencies and is lulled into unthinking conformity by a form of entertainment which “is at a literacy level not much higher than that of children’s programming.” In order to maximize its audience and thus its revenue, commercial media must be aimed, claims Lazere, at “the lowest common denominator of cognitive development” (289). A Deculturated Pynchon? 457 critical commentary). While he considered “the density of reference to the ephem- era of popular culture […] almost numbing,” he also read the novel as “a devastat- ing statement about the shortness of the American cultural memory” (71). With later criticism, the view that Vineland’s suffusion with television and pop culture amounted to a critique of that very culture became more widespread. Chambers, for example, argued that Vineland shows the dark sides of television, namely, “feeding escapism, annihilating the desire to read and the ability to write and spell, disturbing the distinction between real and staged violence” (193), and M. Keith Booker suggested that the “lack of references to ‘high culture’ in Vine- land thus becomes a commentary on the degraded condition of a modern society in which high culture no longer has a place, much in the tradition of the lament for the death of high culture in The Waste Land of T. S. Eliot” (94). We may ask, however, if the inclusion of all the pop in Vineland does not undermine the novel’s functioning as such a commentary. Aren’t messages along the lines of ‘TV dis- tracts us from politics’ or ‘there is no high culture in here because contemporary society is all surface’ a little too simplistic? Cowart is right when he notes that Pynchon seems to be “genuinely fond of much popular culture” (71). The contra- diction between the view of Vineland as a critique of popular culture and its ap- parent fondness for it can be resolved if we consider Vineland’s character Prairie as a resisting reader in Judith Fetterley’s sense. It is here that Vineland can be read as an intervention.

Prairie as Resisting Reader

The figure of Prairie Wheeler challenges the reading anxieties of the decade. Prairie has been brought up on television, “bathing in Tubelight” as a baby and spending Saturday mornings watching movies (286, 192). Like so many other characters in Vineland, she is a viewer rather than a reader. For example, she learns about her mother not through written documents or journals, but through watching 24fps footage. Considering that the 1980s saw an increasing amount of criticism fusing reading and viewing (see, for example, John Fiske and John Hartley’s Reading Television), it is legitimate to say the Vineland can be read as a Bildungsroman of Prairie’s development toward becoming what I would call a resisting reader. The term is borrowed, of course, from Judith Fetterley, who describes her book The Resisting Reader as “a self-defense survival manual for the woman reader lost in ‘the masculine wilderness of the American novel’” (viii). Fetterley claims that while literature pretends to speak universal truths, in fact “only one reality is encouraged, legitimized, and transmitted” (xi). This reality is the male perspective. Since the reader inscribed in most canonical works is male, the female reader is forced to identify as male: “women are taught to think as men, to identify with a male point of view, and to accept as normal and legitimate a male system of values, one of whose central principles is misogyny” (xx). The feminist critic therefore has a clear political goal: to resist this system of values and to empower female readers. “Clearly, then,” Fetterley writes, “the first act of the feminist critic must be to become a resisting rather than an assenting reader 458 Tobias Meinel and, by this refusal to assent, to begin the process of exorcising the male mind that has been implanted in us” (xxii). Her resisting reading disrupts this male perspec- tive and imposes a new, liberating perspective on the text. In the end, this has implications which transcend the realm of literature. Fetterley imagines the goal of feminist reading as follows: “To create a new understanding of our literature is to make possible a new effect of that literature on us. And to make possible a new effect is in turn to provide the conditions for changing the culture that literature reflects” (xix-xx). Fetterley’s concept of the resisting reader is later expanded by Kay Boardman, who develops the idea of the renegade reader: “The renegade reader not only resists and reads against the grain, but actively constructs a num- ber of alternative readings available from within the text” (208). In the end, this constitutes a deconstructive reading with a feminist agenda: “A renegade reading practice exposes the gaps in the text and attributes significant agency to the reader in the production of meaning and thus breaks through and shatters the ‘truth’ of the classic realist text” (214). This oppositional attitude—also to be found in many 1980s readers assuming defensive positions against patriarchy, the ideal reader and universalized notions of the reader, television, dominant ideology, Western imperialism, anti-intellectualism, and so on—is both the stance assumed by Pra- rie and a stance the novel encourages us to assume. Considering Vineland’s suffusion with popular culture and its fascination with martial arts (in the figure of DL), it is possibly no coincidence that Prairie’s jour- ney toward becoming a resisting reader reads like the plot of a kung fu movie such as The 36th Chamber of the Shaolin: the stereotypical story line of ‘inexperienced and bright-eyed apprentice shows potential, enters a training facility, is perhaps rejected at first, makes progress through strict and arduous training, and has to pass a final challenge or face the villain in order to graduate’ certainly applies to Prairie’s experience in the novel. Having inherited the ability to read between the lines from her mother,6 Prairie shows her potential early on. She considers the fads and beliefs of her parents’ generation “idiot peacenik stuff” (Vineland 16) and wonders if some of her dad’s theories amount to anything more than just “pothead paranoia” (46). Furthermore, Prairie is apparently able to ‘handle’ television— in contrast to Zuñiga, whom television seems to have taken by surprise. Unlike Zuñiga, “a real cop [who] has delusions that he is a TV one,” as Richard Powers puts it (693), Prairie knows to draw a line between TV and real life. Although she wishes, when escaping from Vond with DL and Takeshi, that they were “some family in a family car, with no problems that couldn’t be solved in half an hour of wisecracks and commercials” (191), she knows that life is not a sitcom. After prov- ing her resisting potential, Prairie is taken in by teachers who direct and shape her talent. When she meets DL and is driven to the mountainside retreat of the “Sis- terhood of the Kunoichi Attentives,” a school for female Ninjas, her real training

6 For Frenesi’s reading between the lines, see for example: “Frenesi had absorbed politics all through her childhood, but later, seeing older movies on the Tube with her parents, making for the first time a connection between the far-off images and her real life, it seemed she had misunderstood everything, paying too much attention to the raw emotions, the easy conflicts, when something else, some finer drama the Movies had never considered worth ennobling had been unfolding all the time” (Pynchon 81-82). A Deculturated Pynchon? 459 begins. It his here that she learns about her mother and that, as “Head Ninjette” Sister Rochelle tells her, “knowledge won’t come down all at once in any big tran- scendent moment” (112). Sister Rochelle, who in another moment tells of a female Garden of Eden (166), is a prototypical feminist resisting reader and thus an indi- cator of the direction of Prairie’s apprenticeship. Sister Rochelle’s description of “sleazy, slippery man […] who invented ‘good’ and ‘evil,’ where before women had been content to just be” (166) clearly shows her resisting a male system of values and creating a new understanding of a known text. The next steps in Prairie’s education are listening to DL and Takeshi’s stories and watching the 24fps archives. Throughout her training she proves her progress by continually interrupting the stories. Her comments “I knew it!” (in response to the first hints at a relationship between Frenesi and Brock Vond), “Now wait a minute,” or “My mom killed a guy?” (141, 151, 188) portray her as a skeptical, at- tentive, and resistant receiver. In addition, these interruptions are literal interrup- tions of the novel’s narration as DL or Takeshi’s voice blends with the narrator’s voice in these sections. Prairie thus reminds us of the narrative frame. Her visit to a shopping mall in Hollywood with her friend Ché at the beginning of the last chapter marks the end of her apprenticeship and demonstrates the extent to which she has become a resisting reader. Just as everyday America has been trivialized, commercialized, and McDonaldized in the novel, the “Noir Center,” a film noir- themed mall, epitomizes what Prairie sees as the “yuppification” of 1940s movies (326). If the ‘Zone’ in Gravity’s Rainbow stands for Slothrop’s reading environ- ment, for the reading scene of the late 1960s and 1970s, the Noir Center could be seen to represent Prairie’s ‘reconfigured’ reading environment. Significantly, Prairie and Ché exhibit an anarchic defiance of this temple of commerce: instead of participating in happy consumption, they steal an “amazing […] volume of un- derwear” from Macy’s (332). More importantly, however, Prairie sees through the “uniform commercial twilight” (329):

she personally resented this increasingly dumb attempt to cash in on the pseudoromantic mystique of those particular olden days in this town, having heard enough stories from [her grandparents] to know better than most how corrupted everything had really been from top to bottom. (326)

Apprentice resisting reader Prairie has passed her final test and can now face the villain, Brock Vond. Having completed her apprenticeship, she is embraced by the other Traverses as “a true Traverse” (320). She is their hope for redemption, avoiding the mistakes of Frenesi and Zoyd’s generation and thus, as Chambers rightly claims, “Pynchon’s gesture towards renewal” (203). If the New Left of the Sixties failed because they, as Isaiah puts it, “didn’t understand much about the Tube” (373), then Prairie, who does understand it, may have a set of skills that her parents’ generation lacked. Although Prairie is not free from the weaknesses of her mother, her knowledge of television culture, along with her education about her mother’s mistakes (and perhaps also those of her mother’s generation) consti- tutes hope for the future. Vineland, argues Booker, “finally suggests that positive action is possible, provided that the participants have sufficient theoretical aware- ness to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past” (88). If the “Noir Center,” with 460 Tobias Meinel its plastic lifelessness, its brown-uniformed security police, and its mineral-water boutiques, is a microcosm of Vineland’s America, then Prairie has shown that she is not an indoctrinated, inert, and apolitical couch potato, but rather is able to “dance through the minefield,”7 think for herself, and resist official narratives that are pushed on her from the outside. If indeed Pynchon’s novels involve readers in the very issues their characters are confronted with, then Prairie’s resisting stance also tells us something about our own reading. And sure enough, the last chapter gives us plenty of opportunity to say, with Prairie, “Now wait a minute.” If the quest for V., the Tristero, or the Rocket is replaced in Vineland by the quest for the mother, as Marc C. Conner has argued (72), one cannot help but notice that the reunion between Prairie and Frenesi—only one page long—is rather anticlimactic. Are we supposed to read this scene as a happy ending, as some critics have done?8 Prairie finally meets her mother, DL and Takeshi renegotiate their “no-sex clause” (Vineland 381), and the bad guy is defeated. And yet, are we supposed to believe that Zoyd, Prairie, and Frenesi’s parents have nothing critical to say about Frenesi’s running away with the political enemy? Do Frenesi’s critical thoughts about “the State law-enforce- ment apparatus that was calling itself ‘America’” and her opposition to Zuñiga’s “Tubal fantasies” and right-wing cop shows mean that she is rehabilitating from her betrayal (354, 345)? We ought to be skeptical. I believe that the ending con- stitutes a calculated move designed to trigger an uneasy feeling—or, if you will, a resisting stance. There are, after all, several dampers that spoil the happy end- ing: first of all, even at the family reunion the Tube is ever-present. If television is a mind-numbing distraction and one of the secret villains of Vineland, then it is certainly not a good sign that even the Traverses cannot be without it. Second, although Vond is gone at the end of the novel, it is obvious that there are still sin- ister forces out there. Vineland is no Return of the Jedi, in which the evil empire is defeated at the end. Pynchon makes sure to emphasize that Reagan is still pulling the strings in the background and that what is up ahead does not look that prom- ising either. There will, it seems, always be “some white male far away” (376). It is 1984 and Reagan will be reelected in November. The “faceless predators” that are after Takeshi are still at large (383), and young folks are signing up volun- tarily for government jobs. And finally, we should not forget that Vineland almost ends like Orwell’s 1984. Prairie’s call to the just vanished Brock Vond, “You can

7 Annette Kolodny’s term (see her “Dancing through the Minefield”). 8 The coming together of the Traverse family, the reunion of mother and daughter, and the sense of community are surely a far cry from the waterspout that kills Sidney Stencil at the end of V. or Slothrop’s scattering and the descent of the rocket at the end of Gravity’s Rainbow. Conner, for whom Vineland constitutes a “major aesthetic shift” (65)—from the sublime to the beautiful—has therefore argued that in Vineland “the individual is conserved, sheltered, and healed,” whereas Pynchon’s first three novels depicted the “fragmentation and dispersion of the individual will and consciousness” (81). Similarly, for Edward Mendelson the end of Vine- land signals renewal and the end of an interregnum in which the older generation fulfilled the younger generation’s yearning for parental discipline: “At the end of Vineland this era ends, not with an apocalyptic upheaval, which would mark the end of time, but in a refusal of apocalypse, when human time renews itself, and death and life regain their dominion” (“Levity” 44). A Deculturated Pynchon? 461 come back […] It’s OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don’t care. Take me anyplace you want” (384), comes dangerously close to Winston Smith’s final admittance in 1984—“But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother” (Orwell 308)—and em- phasizes the fragility of the ‘victory’ at the end of Vineland. I believe that Booker is right in pointing out that there is “a great deal of parody in this mock-romance ending, and all of the rest of the book warns us against the expectation of easy solutions to all our problems” (98).

“Wait a minute”

Given that the text encourages us to resist its content and that Prairie functions as a model to follow, I argue that Vineland offers a comment on the reading anxiet- ies of the decade. Pynchon’s fourth novel is therefore neither a ‘deculturated Pyn- chon’ nor simply a diatribe against the superficiality of contemporary culture but constitutes a sophisticated commentary that complicates the slogans and discus- sions of the Culture Wars. While there certainly is a caveat against TV in carica- tures such as Hector Zuñiga or in Isaiah’s aforementioned evaluation of the failure of Sixties activism, the overall tone is self-aware, playful, satirical, somewhat fond of TV culture, and certainly far removed from the alarmism of Petrucci or Lazere. Pynchon’s “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee,” his article on sloth in the New York Times Book Review published three years after Vineland, shows a similar tone—certain- ly critical of some of the Tube’s effects but also tongue-in-cheek: Any discussion of Sloth in the present day is of course incomplete without considering television, with its gifts of paralysis, along with its creature and symbiont, the notori- ous Couch Potato. Tales spun in idleness find us Tubeside, supine, chiropractic fodder, sucking it all in, re-enacting in reverse the transaction between dream and revenue that brought these colored shadows here to begin with so that we might feed, uncritically, committing the six other deadly sins in parallel, eating too much, envying the celebrated, coveting merchandise, lusting after images, angry at the news, perversely proud of what- ever distance we may enjoy between our couches and what appears on the screen. (57) The humorous tone of this essay, along with Pynchon’s fondness for popular cul- ture displayed in all of his novels, suggest that the message of Vineland is more complicated than simple slogans along the lines of ‘contemporary culture has de- clined, Reagan is bad, TV makes us inert, and we, in response, have to resist, read books, read between the lines, and be skeptical. After all, wouldn’t Pynchon be preaching to the choir? Doesn’t Pynchon’s audience already consist of people who are not only readers but who also may agree with the impulse to resist America Incorporated? Let us return to the notion that our response and our problems in reading are inscribed in the novel. Many critics did not notice that their reaction was antici- pated by Prairie’s reaction to her environment. In her disgust with the Noir Cen- ter, for example, we may discover the critics who were turned off by Vineland’s suffusion with pop culture. In her “wait a minute” we may recognize our own resistance to the novel’s conclusion. In Prairie, then, whom I have characterized 462 Tobias Meinel as a resisting reader, we may discern a general oppositional attitude that should tell us that the novel is meant to make us feel uneasy; we are meant to join Prairie in saying “wait a minute.” With this awareness, we can read the novel as a comment on reading and in- terpretation. Prairie can teach us several things: not only do her story and her environment illustrate the importance and difficulty of oppositional reading, but by having her repeatedly interrupt the narrative flow of the novel Pynchon also reminds us that the stories about Frenesi’s or DL’s past are not objective accounts of a third-person narrator but interpretations or stories told by other characters. We are discouraged “from suspending our skepticism and accepting the stories as the objective truth of what happened” (McLaughlin 117), and we are, perhaps, reminded of the New Historical notion of history as “a constructed representa- tion of events” (Schweickart and Flynn 10). Vineland, then, encourages us to do a “renegade reading” which calls the novel’s entire construction of history, of the Sixties, and of Reagan’s America into question. If the novel deconstructs its own representation of historical events, it equally presents its other elements as con- structs that are to be questioned. Accepting Prairie as a model to be followed, we realize that we are meant to resist the text itself and not just the culture presented in the text. We thus should move from simply questioning the pop cultural allu- sions or television culture toward a questioning of what Conner calls “a vision of forgiveness and reconciliation” in the novel (77), of the happy ending, of nostalgia, and of simple slogans like ‘TV is bad’ or ‘Reagan is bad.’ With this we are also discouraged from subscribing to any simple Culture War slogans. Notions such as ‘reading can save us’ or conceptions of reading as “a kind of cultural Je refuse!”—in Franzen’s words (90)—are too simple. It is important to point out here that Brier, in his article about Bobbie Ann Mason’s In Country and reading in the 1980s, argues that the divide between mass culture and literary culture had become “inapplicable” by the 1980s (242), since there was no longer a monolithic mass culture. To simply blame TV for a perceived decline in culture and to present reading as a cure-all is naïve and ignores the development “from the era of ‘mass’ culture to the era of niches” (232). A black-and-white conception of television vs. reading unproductively simplifies the issue, and Prairie reminds us of that. We should also remember that Prairie has been brought up on televi- sion rather than books. Brier’s comment about In Country’s protagonist Sam thus also applies to Prairie: “But the fact that Sam thinks critically about a television show despite not being an avid reader seems like evidence that television does not prevent the emergence of a critical consciousness” (241). What Hayden Johnson has said about television—that it deals “in slogans, myths, happy endings, and fragmentary images” and that it has “a short attention span” (140)—may also apply to literary criticism itself, to slogans of the Culture Wars, and to some critics’ readings of Vineland. A reduction of Vineland to slo- gans, myths, or happy endings itself falls into the trap of not moving beyond su- perficiality. The novel makes us part of an experiment in which we are distracted by appearances and lulled into accepting superficial messages—we become what we have warned others about: stereotypical TV consumers, browsers rather than attentive readers. The many critics who were sidetracked by Vineland’s superficial A Deculturated Pynchon? 463 appearance proved that they were analogous with the television viewers so many intellectuals decried. All this confirms Vineland as a highly self-reflexive novel that complicates cause and effect in the discussions about reading, mass culture, and television. It is not just television that can lull people into unthinking and un- critical acceptance; reading can do the same thing. It can be escapist and equally cater to a need for slogans, simple messages, and happy endings. This shows that simply blaming cultural decline on the Tube is naïve. Similarly, the notion of read- ing as a cure (interestingly held by both the left and the right) is also dismantled as simplifying and unproductive.

Works Cited

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” Lenin and Phi- losophy and Other Essays. Trans. Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review, 1972. 127-86. Print. Bergh, Patricia A. “(De)constructing the Image: Thomas Pynchon’s Postmodern Woman.” Journal of Popular Culture 30.4 (1997): 1-12. Print. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon, 1987. Print. Boardman, Kay. “‘The Glass of Gin.’ Renegade Reading Possibilities in the Clas- sic Realist Text.” Gendering the Reader. Ed. Sara Mills. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. 199-216. Print. Booker, M. Keith. “America and Its Discontents: The Failure of Leftist Politics in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Literature Interpretation Theory 4 (1993): 87-99. Print. Brier, Evan. “Reading in the 1980s: In Country, Minimalism, and the Age of Niches.” Literature Interpretation Theory 19 (2008): 231-47. Print. Chambers, Judith. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Twayne, 1992. Print. Conner, Marc C. “Postmodern Exhaustion: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland and the Aesthetic of the Beautiful.” Studies in American Fiction 24.1 (1996): 65-85. Print. Cowart, David. “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland.” Critique 32.2 (1990): 67-76. Print. Gray, Paul. “The Spores of Paranoia.” Time. 15 Jan. 1990. Web. 3 Mar. 2014. Fetterley, Judith. The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fic- tion. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978. Print. Fiske, John, and John Hartley. Reading Television. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print. Franzen, Jonathan. How to be Alone: Essays. New York: Picador, 2002. Print. Johnson, Haynes. Sleepwalking Through History: America in the Reagan Years. New York: Norton, 1991. Print. Kakutani, Michiko. “Another Doorway to the Paranoid Pynchon Dimension.” New York Times. 3 Aug. 2009. Web. 3 Mar. 2014. Keesey, Douglas. “Vineland in the Mainstream Press: A Reception Study.” Pyn- chon Notes 26-27 (1990): 107-13. Print. Kermode, Frank. “That Was Another Planet.” London Review of Books. 8 Feb. 1990: 3-4. Print. 464 Tobias Meinel

Lazere, Donald. “Literacy and Mass Media: The Political Implications.” Read- ing in America. Ed. Cathy N. Davidson. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins UP, 1989. 285-303. Print. Leonard, John. “The Styxies.” The Nation. 26 Feb. 1990: 281-86. Print. McLaughlin, Robert L. “Mediating the Past: Narrative, History, and Teaching Vineland.” Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works. Ed. Thomas H. Schaub. New York: MLA, 2008. 114-20. Print. Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon. Ed. George Levine and David Leverenz. Boston: Little, 1976. 161-96. Print. ---. “Levity’s Rainbow.” The New Republic. 9 July 1990: 40-46. Print. Mills, Sara, ed. Gendering the Reader. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Print. Orwell, George. 1984. Centennial Edition. New York: Plume, 2003. Print. Petrucci, Armando. “Reading to Read: A Future for Reading.” A History of Reading in the West. Ed. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1999. 345-67. Print. Powers, Richard. “State and Vine.” Yale Review 79.4 (1990): 690-98. Print. Pynchon, Thomas. “Nearer, My Couch, to Thee.” New York Times Book Review. 6 June 1993: 3, 57. Print. ---. Vineland. Boston: Little, 1990. Print. Rushdie, Salman. “Still Crazy After All These Years.” New York Times. 14 Jan. 1990. Web. 3 Mar. 2014. Schaub, Thomas Hill, ed. Approaches to Teaching Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Other Works. New York: MLA, 2008. Print. Schweickart, Patrocinio P., and Elizabeth A. Flynn. Reading Sites: Social Differ- ence and Reader Response. New York: MLA, 2004. Print. Slade, Joseph W. “Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland.” Critique 32.3 (1990): 126-44. Print. Yardley, Jonathan. “The Increasing Irrelevance of Writing.” The Washington Post. 8 Dec. 1986: D2. Print. Zill, Nicholas, and Marianne Winglee. Who Reads Literature? The Future of the United States as a Nation of Readers. Cabin John, MD: Seven Locks, 1990. Print.