Critique, 51:198–222, 2010

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 0011-1619 print/1939-9138 online
DOI: 10.1080/00111610903379925

Spectres of Marx in
Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland

S KIP W ILLMAN

ABSTRACT: Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) examines how political de-

monology forges consensus in America. Tracking the manipulative deployment
of a conspiratorial enemy, Vineland envisions American history as repetition.
The novel examines the traumatic consequences of the paranoid fantasies con-
structing American social reality in the history of the Traverse-Becker family
and the Thanatoids. By making use of the rival theories of spectrality proposed
by Derrida and Žižek, I demonstrate how Vineland explores the victims of a
countersubversive tradition that repeatedly exploits political paranoia to secure
the status quo in changing historical circumstances. Moreover, the novel presents
an alternative to official history in what Walter Benjamin calls “revolutionary
nostalgia.”

Keywords: Derrida, Pynchon, revolutionary nostalgia, specter, Vineland, Žižek

I n the wake of the War on Terror with its revitalization of a political de-
monology dormant since the end of the Cold War, I believe it may be
beneficial to revisit Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990), since the novel
examines how this paranoid strategy has forged consensus in American society
throughout the twentieth century. The novel locates the “paranoid style” not
in the margins of society, as historian Richard Hofstadter famously argues, but
rather in the mainstream as a repressive and normalizing power. As Michael
Rogin contends, the “countersubversive tradition at the center of American

198 CRITIQUE
politics” indulges in political demonology in order to construct its hegemony,
splitting “the world in two” and “attributing magical, pervasive power to a
conspiratorial center of evil” (xiii). Conspiracy theory thereby contributes to
the ideological coherence of social reality, as well as offering an explanation for
the tragic derailment of the operations of society at the hands of this corrupting
force.1
By tracking the manipulative use of fantasy constructions of the conspiratorial
enemy, Vineland envisions American history as repetition, virtually foreshad-
owing the dangerous reemergence of the countersubversive tradition with the
Bush administration (and the endless returns of its “demonic” figures, such as
Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the real-world counterparts to the novel’s
arch-villain, federal prosecutor Brock Vond). This rendering of the political
stakes of conspiracy theory represents something of a departure for Pynchon,
as Salman Rushdie notes in his review of the book: “What is new here is the
willingness with which Pynchon addresses, directly, the political development of
the United States, and the slow (but not total) steamrollering of a radical tradition
many generations and decades older than flower power” (356). In his first three
novels, V., The Crying of Lot 49, and Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon explores the
existential dilemma of confronting a universe governed either by paranoia, in
which “everything is connected” (Gravity’s Rainbow 703), or anti-paranoia: “If
there is something comforting—religious, if you want—about paranoia, there
is still also anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything, a condition
not many of us can bear for long” (434). While these early novels bristle with
the theologically-inclined paranoid “reflex of seeking other orders behind the
visible” (188), Vineland tackles a far more cynical form of paranoia. The novel
exemplifies Rogin’s critique of mainstream American political demonology by
tracing the tragic consequences of the series of conspiratorial fantasies construct-
ing American social reality in the fraught history of the Traverse-Becker family
and the traumatic fate of the Thanatoids, the specters who gravitate toward
Vineland in their hazy hopes of retribution. By making use of the rival theories
of spectrality proposed by Jacques Derrida and Slavoj Žižek, I hope to illustrate
how Vineland explores the very real victims of a countersubversive tradition
that repeatedly exploits political paranoia to secure the status quo in changing
historical circumstances. Moreover, the novel presents an alternative to official
history in the form of what Walter Benjamin calls “revolutionary nostalgia” that
counters the loss of historical sense that cripples the radical tradition.

Rival Versions of the Specter: Derrida versus Žižek

Pynchon’s Thanatoids anticipate the preoccupation with the specter obsessing

the academic community following the publication of Jacques Derrida’s Specters
of Marx (English translation 1994). Derrida examines the attempted exorcism

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of the ghost of Marx after the fall of communism in the Soviet Union and
the purported triumph of liberal democracy and market capitalism. Derrida’s
belated intervention reasserts the inescapable critical “inheritance” of Marxism
and rearticulates the Marxian problematic by foregrounding the idea of “justice.”
Derrida’s reappraisal of the legacy of Marx notably dismisses class struggle, a
proposal that disappointed many Marxist critics.2 Nevertheless, Derrida argues
that justice can only be achieved through a rapprochement with the specter:
“It is necessary to speak of the ghost, indeed to the ghost and with it, from
the moment that no ethics, no politics, whether revolutionary or not, seems
possible and thinkable and just that does not recognize in its principle the
respect for those others who are no longer or for those others who are not
yet there, presently living, whether they are already dead or not yet born” (xix).
More importantly, Derrida describes the constitutive relationship between social
reality and the spectral apparition: “At a time when a new world disorder is
attempting to install its neo-capitalism and neo-liberalism, no disavowal has
managed to rid itself of all of Marx’s ghosts. Hegemony still organizes the
repression and thus the confirmation of a haunting. Haunting belongs to the
structure of every hegemony” (37). The logic of the specter unfolds, then,
as the return of the repressed: “As at the time of the Manifesto, a European
alliance is formed which is haunted by what it excludes, combats, or represses”
(61). Vineland explores this haunting that structures every hegemonic formation;
Pynchon’s long-running preoccupation with the preterite is reconceived as a
narrative detailing the exclusion and repression of various specters as they
are conjured and brutally exorcised in political movements from McCarthyism
through the Nixonian Reaction to the Reagan Revolution.
In order to undo the injustice of this repression or “conjuration,” Derrida
offers the following “exordium” that could serve as the message of Vineland as
well:

[T]o learn to live with ghosts, in the upkeep, the conversation, the company,
or the companionship, in the commerce without commerce of ghosts. To
live otherwise, and better. No, not better, but more justly. But with them.
No being-with the other, no socius without this with that makes being-with
in general more enigmatic than ever for us. And this being-with specters
would also be, not only but also, a politics of memory, of inheritance, and
of generations. (xviii–xix)

For Derrida, the “commerce without commerce of ghosts” forms the ethical
dimension of his call for a “New International,” or “a link of affinity, suffering,
and hope [: : : ] without party, without country, without national community
(International before, across, and beyond any national determination), without
co-citizenship, without common belonging to a class” (85). Derrida advocates
a nontheological communion of ghosts, articulating a chain of equivalence
among the repressed elements of the global “new world disorder” in his “New

200 CRITIQUE
International.” This ethical prescription from Derrida’s “hauntology” is readily
apparent in Pynchon’s fiction, a connection Daniel Punday has noted: “Derrida
implies throughout that maintaining a relation with such specters is a form of
ethical work; while we may never fully make amends for wrongs done in the
past or discharge our responsibility, seeking out such specters is indeed ethical
and an attempt to achieve justice” (257).
Derrida does not represent, however, the last theoretical word on the specter.
Slavoj Žižek disputes Derrida’s exordium to learn to live with the specter. Žižek
contends that the spectre is a fantasy figure that serves to mask the antagonisms
and contradictions inherent to the social system: “The structure of social reality
itself materializes an attempt to cope with the real of antagonism. ‘Reality’
itself, in so far as it is regulated by a symbolic fiction, conceals the real of
an antagonism—and it is this real, foreclosed from the symbolic fiction, that
returns in the guise of spectral apparitions” (“Spectre” 26). Žižek suggests that
the “supreme example” of this foreclosed antagonism is the Marxian conception
of class struggle, which he equates with the Lacanian register of the Real. Class
struggle represents “an impediment which gives rise to ever-new symbolizations
by means of which one endeavours to integrate and domesticate it [: : : ] but which
simultaneously condemns these endeavours to ultimate failure” (22). He argues
that a coherent social reality relies upon the dialectical “codependence” of two
dimensions of fantasy, a “stabilizing dimension” of a vision of a harmonious and
nonantagonistic whole, which he calls a “symbolic fiction” and a “destabilizing
dimension” obsessed with the threat posed by the Other that materializes in
the “spectral apparition” (“‘I Hear You with My Eyes”’ 116). The principal
example Žižek gives of the reliance between these two dimensions of social
fantasy is Nazi Germany: the symbolic fiction of a harmonious and superior
Aryan nation depends upon the threat posed by the spectral apparition of the
Jew. The emergence of this spectre testifies to a “distortion” or “dissimulation”
inherent to social reality, but one that is, paradoxically, constitutive of that
social reality. The “inherent impossibility” of society, “the antagonism at its
very heart” (116), is disavowed and projected onto the fantasy figure of the
Jew. Contrary to Derrida’s prescription, Žižek argues that we must “traverse the
fantasy” supporting this vision of social reality and recognize in the figure of the
spectral apparition “the necessary product of our very social system” (Sublime
128). In other words, Žižek objects to Derrida’s exordium because learning to
live with ghosts maintains the constitutive fantasy-frame of the symbolic order,
the ideological linchpin of society that must be dismantled in order to overturn
the fascist project.
Within Vineland, these two conceptions of the specter coexist: (1) the spectral
apparition supporting the symbolic fiction of Žižek and (2) the revenants of the
victims of political violence of Derrida. On the one hand, the novel suggests the
U.S. government has relied upon the spectral apparitions of communism, hippie
hedonism, and student radicalism, among others, to constitute a coherent social

VOL. 51, NO. 3 201

reality by offering convenient scapegoats for the inherent social antagonisms of
American society. The historical present of the novel, 1984, utilizes merely the
latest in a string of countersubversive conjurations, the War on Drugs, which is
propagated under the aegis of the Reagan Revolution to exorcise the threat to
the nation posed by the spectral apparition of drug culture.
On the other hand, Vineland traces a tattered historical legacy across the
twentieth century that Derrida’s gloss of the “specters of Marx” helps illuminate.
Although he offers no conclusive definition of the specter, preferring to tease out
various conceptions of the revenant from Hamlet to Das Kapital, Derrida intro-
duces a “constellation of haunting” that delineates the central themes at work in
Marx’s specters and Pynchon’s novel, namely the work of mourning, inheritance,
justice, and the state of the debt. The novel begins with Zoyd Wheeler, who is
haunted by the memory of his brief marriage to radical filmmaker turned FBI
informant, Frenesi Gates, while he is pursued by two figures from his past in the
sixties: a deranged DEA agent named Hector Zuñiga and the man responsible
for the end of his marriage, federal prosecutor Brock Vond. The narrative then
turns to Prairie, Zoyd’s daughter with Frenesi Gates, as she tries to come to
terms with her maternal inheritance, studying the ghost of her mother on film
and in computer data banks.
The Derridean spectral themes of inheritance, mourning, and the state of the
debt emerge most clearly in Frenesi’s story. Coming from a family of radicals
and victims of the countersubversive tradition—Wobblies as grandparents and
blacklisted socialists from the film industry as parents—Frenesi inherits a keen
sense of the tradition of the oppressed. She joins a radical film collective, 24fps,
in the sixties that seeks to document the oppression of the U.S. government
with the film camera. However, she betrays her radical inheritance and incurs
symbolic debts by helping Brock Vond destroy the People’s Republic of Rock
and Roll, specifically, by setting up the murder of its leader and her lover, Weed
Atman. Her betrayal precipitates a period of self-recrimination, longing, and
regression, which constitutes the work of mourning:
More than any man she had ever wanted for anything, more than a full
pardon from some unnamed agency for what she’d done, more than DL in
her arms, the State in final rubble, guns silent, tanks and bombs all melted
down, more than anything she’d ever wished for over a lifelong childhood
of praying to a variety of Santas, Frenesi wanted, would have given up all
the rest for, a chance to go back to when she and Sasha had talked hours,
nights, with no restraints, everything from penis folklore to Mom, where
do we go when we die? Of all her turnings, this turn against Sasha her
once-connected self would remain a puzzle she would never quite solve, a
mystery beyond any analysis she could bring to it. (Vineland 292)

Her desire to return to the primacy of the mother–child relationship signals her
regret for her betrayal of her own maternal inheritance, even as it discounts
the radical politics that constitute that inheritance. Frenesi’s subsequent work

202 CRITIQUE
for Vond within the “snitch system” compounds the debt and necessitates the
repression of her history of betrayal.
Frenesi’s interpellation into the Nixonian Reaction hinges on the repression
of “history and the dead.” Nevertheless, this repressed material returns to haunt
her: “The past was on her case forever, the zombie at her back, the enemy no
one wanted to see, a mouth wide and dark as the grave” (Vineland 71). One
such figurative haunting occurs during a dream, in which Frenesi follows her
father into the country to his next lighting job, though she cannot quite catch
up to him:

She called after him, but he wouldn’t turn, only went on at the same laden
crawl, answering by denying her his face, “Take care, Young Gaffer. Take
care of your dead, or they’ll take care of you.”

Hurt, furious, she yelled back, “Yeah, or maybe they’re just too busy being
dead.” And though she couldn’t see it, she could feel the emptiness that
came into his face then, and that was when she woke. : : : (370)

As in Lacan’s reinterpretation of Freud’s “Dream of the Burning Child,” Frenesi

confronts the real of her desire in this dream, namely her feelings of guilt over
her betrayal of her father’s radical principles. His obvious disappointment in
the dream is too much for Frenesi to bear, so she awakes in order to escape
his disconcerting judgment, which, of course, is obviously her own, since it is
her dream.3 Taking care of the dead involves integrating the repressed narrative
of the victims of the system into historical memory. Pynchon contends that the
difficulty with this prescription involves the very loss of a historical sense into
which this tradition of the oppressed may be integrated.
The novel tackles the spectral theme of justice in the case of the true specters
of Vineland, the Thanatoids. The Thanatoids represent not only a phantasmatic
disavowal of the antagonism at the very heart of society, as Žižek would argue,
but they also materialize that antagonism in the form of the victims of the social
system, “be they victims of wars, political or other kinds of violence, nationalist,
racist, colonialist, sexist, or other kinds of exterminations, victims of the oppres-
sion of capitalist imperialism or any of the forms of totalitarianism” (Derrida
xix). As historical victims, the Thanatoids haunt the “scabland garrison state the
green free America [: : : ] even then was turning into” (Vineland 314): “They were
victims [: : : ] of karmic imbalances—unanswered blows, unredeemed suffering,
escapes by the guilty—anything that frustrated their daily expeditions on into
the interior of Death, with Shade Creek a psychic jumping-off town—behind
it, unrolling, regions unmapped, dwelt in by these transient souls in constant
turnover, not living but persisting, on the skimpiest of hopes” (173). The spectral
incorporation of the Thanatoids hinges on the “resentment” that keeps them
“from advancing further into the condition of death” (171). This resentment
places them in a symbolic economy “constrained [: : : ] by history and by rules

VOL. 51, NO. 3 203

of imbalance and restoration,” so that they “feel little else beyond their needs
for revenge” (171). Moreover, the Thanatoids occupy a disjointed temporality
hovering between the past of these “unanswered blows” and the slightest of
messianic “hopes” for future redemption.
The crucial figure for unlocking the spectral logic of the narrative is Weed
Atman, the leader of the short-lived People’s Republic of Rock and Roll, who
is gunned down in a plot organized by Brock Vond and carried out by Frenesi
Gates. Frenesi plants rumors in PR3 that Weed is an FBI informant, and this story
precipitates his murder at the hands of Rex Snuvvle, a true believer in the cause.
As a Thanatoid, Weed Atman drifts through California awaiting retribution.
Atman and the other Thanatoids return, as Žižek argues of the living dead,
“because they were not properly buried. [: : : ] The return of the dead is a sign
of a disturbance in the symbolic rite, in the process of symbolization; the dead
return as collectors of some unpaid symbolic debt” (Looking Awry 23).
Vineland renders the conception of justice in economic terms fit for its eighties
setting. Blending the Eastern idea of karma in a vaguely parodic take on New
Age practices with an entrepreneurial spirit of identifying new and potentially
lucrative markets, Takeshi Fumimota and DL Chastain establish a Karmic Ad-
justment business in the Thanatoid community of Shade Creek to help settle
the historical scores of these restless ghosts. The two of them offer to dive into
the “impossibly complicated [: : : ] tales of dispossession and betrayal,” seeking
possible avenues of revenge, so the “inexhaustible supply of clients” (172) in
Shade Creek won’t have to do it for themselves. Moreover, karmic adjustment
ultimately comes to mimic the contemporary market system:

In traditional karmic adjustment, he went on, sometimes it had taken cen-

turies. Death was the driving pulse—everything had moved as slowly as the
cycles of birth and death, but this proved to be too slow for enough people
to begin, eventually, to provide a market niche. There arose a system of
deferment, of borrowing against karmic futures. Death, in Modern Karmic
Adjustment, got removed from the process. (174–75)

Mason & Dixon (1997) represents the idea of justice in economic terms as
well, in the form of an “Account Book,” an image that seems apropos for the
burgeoning capitalist society of eighteenth-century England. The conception of
the specter as obsessed with collecting debts, symbolic or otherwise, is confirmed
in the fictional adventures of the “Ghastly Fop,” the eponymous character of a
serialized novel that many of the characters eagerly follow: “To some he seems
quite conventionally alive, whilst others swear he is a Ghost. That no one is
certain, contributes to his peculiar Charm, tho’ Admirers must ever sigh, for but
One Motrix commands his Attention and Fidelity,—the Account-Book. Some
of those nam’d therein have cheated him of money he must collect, others are
creditors he must repay, and so forth” (527). Ultimately, the novel defines justice
in terms of balance.

204 CRITIQUE
 The Instrumentality of Conspiracy Theory

Pynchon’s equation of the Nixon and Reagan administrations with fascism

may strike some as hyperbole, the disgruntled ranting of a disenchanted dinosaur
from the sixties: “Then again, it’s the whole Reagan program, isn’t it—dismantle
the New Deal, reverse the effects of World War II, restore fascism at home and
around the world, flee into the past, can’t you feel it, all the dangerous childish
stupidity” (Vineland 265). Nevertheless, the fantasy logic underlying the Nixon
and Reagan hegemonies shares with fascism a spurious projection of the ills of
society onto some conspiratorial agent introducing corruption into an otherwise
harmonious society. Pynchon describes the symbolic fiction of the Reagan years
as a cozy fantasy of the State, protecting its citizens from the constant threat
posed by some ever-changing enemy. Frenesi acknowledges this fantasy when
she contemplates the path she and her husband, Flash, once chose to become
stooges for the government:

They had both been content to leave it that way, to go along in a government-
defined history without consequences, never imagining it could end, turn out
to be only another Reaganite dream on the cheap, some snoozy fantasy about
kindly character actors in FBI suits staked out all night long watching over
every poor scraggly sheep in the herd it was their job to run, the destined
losers whose only redemption would have to come through their usefulness
to the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself “America,”
although somebody must have known better. (354)

This pastoral metaphor of shepherds and sheep emphasizes the natural harmony
the “Reaganite dream” posits as the everyday reality that must be protected from
the external threat. The spectral apparition of the conspiratorial enemy, the wolf
in this particular fantasy, shifts conveniently with the times. As Hector Zuñiga
points out, arbitrariness creeps into the selection of this enemy: “Communists
then, dopers now, tomorrow, who knew, maybe the faggots, so what, it was
all the same beef, wasn’t it? Anybody looking like a normal American but
living a secret life was always good for a pop if times got slow—easy and cost-
effective, that was simple Law Enforcement 101” (339). The fantasy construction
of the conspiratorial enemy is a purely cynical and instrumental strategy used
to solidify the countersubversive hegemony.4
According to Žižek, this fantasy of the conspiratorial enemy, the spectral ap-
parition, masks the fact that society is split by a traumatic antagonism that “pre-
vents the community from stabilizing itself into a harmonious whole” (“Spectre”
26). Pynchon captures the repression of this traumatic kernel of the Real from the
symbolic order in a particularly illuminating metaphor that points to the failure
of symbolization characteristic of attempts to render the hopelessly antagonistic
legacy of twentieth-century American history:

VOL. 51, NO. 3 205

 One by one, as other voices joined in, the names began—some shouted,
some accompanied by spit, the old reliable names good for hours of con-
tention, stomach distress, and insomnia—Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon,
Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger, that collection of names and their
tragic interweaving that stood not constellated above in any nightwide re-
motenesses of light, but below, diminished to the last unfaceable American
secret, to be pressed, each time deeper, again and again beneath the meanest
of random soles, one blackly fermenting leaf on the forest floor that nobody
wanted to turn over, because of all that lived, virulent, waiting, just beneath.
(Vineland 371–72)

This constellation of historical figures resists any easy interpretation or sym-

bolization (the very definition of the Real in Lacan), despite the overwhelming
sense of some connection between them in a “tragic interweaving.” Here, the
difficulty of thinking historically and the impossibility of thinking the social
totality are conflated. As Fredric Jameson might point out, they are ultimately
the same thing. The rejection of the astral abstraction (“not constellated above in
any nightwide remotenesses of light”) in favor of the “fermenting leaf” metaphor
accentuates the materiality of this political struggle. More importantly, in this
passage, Pynchon suggests that the ideological coherence of American society
is maintained only by the repression of what lies beneath these figures, since
“nobody wanted to turn over” this “blackly fermenting leaf.”
What is this “last unfaceable American secret”? Pynchon gives no direct
answer to this question, but the legacy of the Traverse-Becker family and its
repetition of failed radical political ventures provides a clue. The history of
the family demonstrates how class struggle erupts in various forms at different
historical junctures. With Jess Traverse and his Wobbly attempts to unionize the
logging industry in Vineland, this social antagonism assumes the form of class
struggle and culminates in real violence: his tragic maiming in centerfield when
his opponents topple a tree on him. Sasha Gates’s experience with blacklisting
in Hollywood during the McCarthy era represents another manifestation of
class struggle, but one in which the phantasmatic character of the conspir-
atorial threat to the American way of life takes precedence over the actual
struggles and represents merely a transparent attempt to account for American
failures abroad and to galvanize the American public behind a Cold War, anti-
Communist cause. Frenesi’s own revolutionary work with the film collective,
24fps, assumes a different form, responding to different social antagonisms
and causes, encompassing the New Left, the Civil Rights Movement, and the
anti-Vietnam War movement.5 The “last unfaceable American secret,” then, is
the impossibility of society. Paradoxically, society “is ‘held together’ by the
very antagonism, splitting, that forever prevents its closure in a harmonious,
transparent, rational Whole—by the very impediment that undermines every
rational totalization” (Žižek, “Spectre” 22). Nor is this a positive development,
for here we encounter the truth of Derrida’s assertion that haunting “belongs to

206 CRITIQUE
the structure of every hegemony” (37). The specter, whether it is represented
as Jews, communists, or terrorists, provides an ideological explanation (in the
sense of false consciousness) for the inability of society to constitute itself as a
“harmonious, transparent, rational Whole.”
The question of this class material, however, cannot be thought without
recourse to some conception of the complicated operations of multinational
capitalism. For Pynchon, as for other members of the “paranoid school of
American fiction,” such as Don DeLillo, representing the workings of the so-
cial totality slides from complexity into the conspiratorial, from the hidden
hand of the market to the hidden machinations of Haliburton. In Vineland, the
characters indulging in conspiracy theory recognize that politics has become a
mere epiphenomenon of something far more fundamental whose contours are
barely discernible, but resemble a class structure. Rex, the true revolutionary
of PR3 and the man who murders Weed Atman, conceives of the class enemy
as the “True Faith”: “some heavy dudes, talking crusades, retribution, closed
ideological minds passing on the Christian Capitalist Faith intact, mentor to
protégé, generation to generation, living inside their power, convinced they’re
immune to all the history the rest of us have to suffer” (232). Later, the novel
gestures toward the beneficiaries of the capitalist system when Brock Vond
catches a “fatal glimpse of that level where everybody knew everybody else,
where however political fortunes below might bloom and die, the same people,
the Real Ones, remained year in and year out, keeping what was desirable
flowing their way” (276). Brock’s “fatal glimpse” points to the fundamental
problem of the individuals in the novel: their inability to map the social totality.
Pynchon resorts to several different tropes when the characters confront the
mind-boggling, global scale of late capitalism, but the bottom line is its funda-
mental mystery:

Far above them some planetwide struggle had been going on for years,
power accumulating, lives worth less, personnel changing, still governed by
the rules of gang war and blood feud, though it had far outgrown them in
scale. Chipco was in it up to their eyeballs, and it looked like the Professor
might have been fading some of the action. Nothing surprised either Takeshi
or Minouru by now about the game, in which the everyday pieces were pirate
ships of the stratosphere and Himalayas held for ransom. (Vineland 146)

The “pirate ships of the stratosphere” to which Takeshi alludes represent yet
another figuration of the incomprehensibility of this “planetwide struggle” that
is removed from the daily experience of the individual subject. The mid-air raids
on various Kahuna Airline flights by aircraft of unknown origin and advanced
technology merely add to the social confusion and the paranoia of people like
Takeshi, as does the “mysterious obliteration of a research complex belonging
to the shadowy world of conglomerate Chipco” (142) by what appears to be “a
saurian creature on the order of—one hundred meters high” (169). This allusion

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to Godzilla represents a comic variation on the problem of the figuration of the
social totality in which the ludicrous substitutes for the impossible.
Takeshi is not alone in his failure to grasp the operations of the social totality.
Thanatoid Weed Atman also encounters a limit in his quest to wreak karmic
revenge upon the perpetrators of his murder. When questioned by Prairie about
why he doesn’t pursue Rex, the man who actually shot him, Weed argues that his
pursuit of “higher justice” forces him to pursue the links up the conspiratorial
ladder to a position which ultimately eludes him: “Rex, why? He’s only the
ceremonial trigger-finger, just a stooge, same as Frenesi. Used to think I was
climbing, step by step, right? toward a resolution—first Rex, above him your
mother, then Brock Vond, then—but that’s when it begins to go dark, and that
door at the top I thought I saw isn’t there anymore, because the light behind
it just went off too” (Vineland 366). Weed’s problem is more significant than
merely an inability to climb to the level of the “Real Ones” like Brock Vond.
The notions of individual agency and simple linear causality fail to capture the
complex relationships constituting the operations of the social totality.
The temptation of conspiracy theory consists of the transformation of the
elusive operations of the social totality into the product of a hidden agent with
malign intentions.6 Near the end of the novel, Sister Rochelle, the Head Ninjette,
DL’s Kuniochi master, and the one person in the novel whose views are not
seriously undermined, describes these invisible Masters as:
[: : : ] the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after the partners [Takeshi and
DL] into Time’s wind, impassive in pursuit, usually gaining, the faceless
predators who’d once boarded Takeshi’s airplane in the sky, the ones who’d
had the Chipco lab stomped on, who despite every Karmic Adjustment re-
source brought to bear so far had simply persisted, stone-humorless, beyond
cause and effect, rejecting all attempts to bargain or accommodate, following
through pools of night where nothing else moved wrongs forgotten by all
but the direly possessed, continuing as a body to refuse to be bought off for
any but the full price, which they had never named. (Vineland 383)

In this passage, Pynchon seems to fall prey to the paranoid style and its fantasy
of an “invisible Master” by describing these “unrelenting forces” as “beyond
cause and effect.”7 According to Hofstadter, the conspiratorial enemy of the
paranoid style is “a perfect model of malice, a kind of amoral superman:
sinister, ubiquitous, powerful, cruel, sensual, luxury-loving. Unlike the rest of
us, the enemy is not caught in the toils of the vast mechanism of history,
himself a victim of his past, his desires, his limitations. He wills, indeed he
manufactures, the mechanism of history itself” (31–32). Thus, while the novel
diagnoses the mainstream uses of conspiracy theory to forge consensus, its own
use of conspiracy theory as the motive force of history is symptomatic of the
cognitive difficulties of late capitalism. As Jameson contends, “conspiracy theory
(and its garish narrative manifestations) must be seen as a degraded attempt—
through the figuration of advanced technology—to think the impossible totality

208 CRITIQUE
of the contemporary world system” (Postmodernism 38). The image of “faceless
predators,” however, does serve to gesture toward the failure of representation
that occurs when confronted with the complexities of the social totality.
In a rare “moment of undeniable clairvoyance,” Frenesi describes the social
forces ranged against her, an attempt at cognitive mapping that blends the figure
of an invisible Master with advanced technology, when she realizes she and
Flash haven been deleted from the government computers:8
She understood that the Reaganomic ax blades were swinging everywhere,
that she and Flash were no longer exempt, might easily be abandoned already
to the upper world and any unfinished business in it that might now resume
: : : as if they’d been kept safe in some time-free zone all these years but now,
at the unreadable whim of something in power, must reenter the clockwork
of cause and effect. Someplace there would be a real ax, or something
just as painful, Jasonic, blade-to-meat final—but at the distance she, Flash,
and Justin had by now been brought to, it would all be done with keys
on alphanumeric keyboards that stood for weightless, invisible chains of
electronic presence or absence. If patterns of ones and zeros were “like”
patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could
be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros,
then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives
and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least—an angel, a minor
god, something in a UFO. It would take eight human lives and deaths just
to form one character in this being’s name—its complete dossier might
take up a considerable piece of the history of the world. We are digits in
God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of
standard gospel tune, [sic] And the only thing we’re good for, to be dead or
to be living, is the only thing He sees. What we cry, what we contend for,
in our world of toil and blood, it all lies beneath the notice of the hacker
we call God. (Vineland 90–91)

Even as she resists the temptation to reduce causality to a linear function

of human agency, Frenesi personalizes the impersonal system, refining her
conception of the hidden agency behind her misfortune from “the unreadable
whim of something in power” to the “hacker we call God.” Resorting to the
theological points to the difficulty experienced by the subject when confronted
with the operations of multinational capitalism. Pynchon phrases this cognitive
difficulty as a discrepancy between the lived experience of individuals and the
agents of historical causality—“an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO”—
one more variation of his opposition between the preterite and the elect.
The moral thrust of the depiction of the central conspiracy foregrounds the
issue of justice, but threatens to turn the novel into the mind-numbing good guy
versus bad guy story of the Star Wars saga Pynchon deliberately invokes, thereby
mystifying any insights into the operations of the social totality. One could
certainly argue that Vineland takes the conspiratorial narrative into the ethical
dimension wherein the inherent contradictions and antagonisms of capitalism are
strategically displaced and seen as “a criminal aberration from the norm, rather

VOL. 51, NO. 3 209

than the norm itself” (Jameson, Signatures 32).9 Parodically resembling Darth
Vader, Brock Vond embodies the figure of the “invisible Master” manipulating
the plots that kill Weed Atman and threaten the lives of Prairie, Zoyd, and
Frenesi years later. The psychological exploration of Vond’s sexual obsession
with Frenesi (and her corresponding response to men in uniform) may be an
attempt to comprehend the fascist link between jouissance and power, but
this minor treatise threatens to trivialize what the novel seemingly aims to
illuminate, namely the political instrumentality of conspiracy theory in the
countersubversive tradition. Moreover, the comic intrusions of Hector Zuñiga,
the DEA agent turned wannabe film director, disrupt the seriousness of the
conspiratorial dimensions of the novel’s exploration of the Reagan Revolution.
Theodor Adorno launches a similar criticism against Brecht’s The Resistible Rise
of Arturo Ui: “Instead of a conspiracy of the wealthy and powerful, we are given
a trivial gangster organization, the cabbage trust. The true horror of fascism is
conjured away; it is not longer a slow end-product of the concentration of social
power, but mere hazard, like an accident or crime” (308). Hector’s episodic
and frenetic incursions into Zoyd’s life lend credence to Zoyd’s paranoia, but
they also discourage a serious examination of the repressive state apparatuses
mobilized to destroy the spectral apparition threatening the American social
fabric.
Nevertheless, the trivialization of both of these figures serves to demonstrate
the imposture of the invisible Master. Until the very end, Brock Vond willfully
and maliciously wields his power, destroying subversive movements through
his manipulation. Most notably, Vond employs Frenesi to sow discord and
plant the seeds of Weed Atman’s betrayal in the minds of the leadership of
the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll in Nixon’s California backyard of
Trasero County. However, the impersonal and vast spending cuts imposed by
Reaganomics disrupt Vond’s attempt to abduct Prairie at the climax of the
novel. Vond’s position as the invisible Master is strictly determined by his
position within the social structure, not by any supposed knowledge or power he
himself possesses. His reversal illustrates that the symbolic fictions regulating
the operations of the social totality are contingent upon an economic bottom
line that makes his enterprise subject to the chopping block. This reversal also
demonstrates the ideological inconsistency of the Reagan Revolution; political
demonology follows a strictly instrumental rationale whereby the cause (the
obsession with the conspiratorial Other that masks the inherent antagonisms of
society) is abandoned when it is no longer cost-effective, regardless of whether
or not the alleged enemy is vanquished. However, on another level, cuts such
as those suffered by Vond are thoroughly consistent with Reagan’s rhetoric
of decreased government spending (with the exception of defense funds) and
deregulation. Despite its proclivity for the ethical dimension, Vineland gestures
toward what more traditional Marxists might call determination in the last
instance by the economic base.

210 CRITIQUE
 From Historicism to Revolutionary Nostalgia:
Battling the Loss of Historical Sense

Vineland diagnoses one of the principal symptoms of contemporary Amer-

ican society and what Jameson identifies as one of the principal features of
postmodernism: the loss of historical sense. Admittedly, this claim runs counter
to many of the initial reviews of the novel that saw it as a thoroughly nostalgic
romp through the sixties, hence symptomatic of the loss of historical sense. In
his insightful analysis, “Cultural Trauma and the ‘Timeless Burst’: Pynchon’s
Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland,” James Berger counters these dismissive
accusations by restoring a critical function to nostalgia by invoking Walter
Benjamin. My own reading of the novel takes Berger’s reading in a more
explicitly Marxist direction by foregrounding class struggle and the various ways
in which this social antagonism has been repressed by the countersubversive
tradition in American politics. (The attention given to labor disputes in the
Colorado mining business of the nineteenth century in Pynchon’s novel, Against
the Day, seems to justify this theoretical move.)
The charge of nostalgia is accurate insofar as the sixties are presented tragi-
cally as a missed opportunity for revolutionary change. However, the accusation
of nostalgia against the novel necessitates a close examination of its represen-
tation of history. At first glance, the history it depicts conforms rather neatly
to an almost stereotypical and nostalgic representation of each decade from the
fifties through the eighties. Each decade bears its own stylistic stamp in terms of
language, music, and fashion. However, Pynchon’s novel emphasizes continuity
through the repetition of social struggles and historical actors (most notably,
Ronald Reagan) across the time periods. The initial reviews of Vineland, thus,
miss the fact that nostalgia presumes a difference between historical periods
that the novel rejects. The social antagonisms remain the same throughout
the twentieth century. The reappearance of Hector Zuńiga and Brock Vond in
1984 presents a “recrudescence” (21) of their persecution of Zoyd in the late
sixties. This historical repetition signals Pynchon’s subscription to a vision of
history much like Benjamin’s ahistoricism, in which history emerges not as “a
chain of events,” but as “one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage
upon wreckage” (257). History becomes not a progression of epochs, but a
“continuum” in which it is the task of the revolutionary or historical materialist
to “blast open” (262). The threat posed by the two-pronged attack of Brock
Vond and Hector Zuñiga consists of the attempt to erase and rewrite the radical
political tradition of the sixties so that it conforms to the official history of the
victors. The novel traces this endangered radical political tradition (that calls
to mind Benjamin’s “tradition of the oppressed”) back to the early decades
of the century. This tradition is important to maintain because the truth of
history, according to Benjamin, resides with its victims: “Not man or men but

VOL. 51, NO. 3 211

the struggling, oppressed class itself is the depository of historical knowledge”
(260). By recounting the radical political tradition encapsulated in the history of
the Traverse-Becker family, the novel takes “a tiger’s leap into the past” (261)
in order to understand the present.
For Pynchon, the postmodern loss of historical sense, exacerbated by the
rewriting of history undertaken in the name of countersubversion, necessitates a
reinvigoration of collective memory. Vineland attempts to do this by presenting
the sixties through what Benjamin calls “revolutionary nostalgia,” the retroactive
rearticulation of historical memory as it “flashes up at a moment of danger”
(Benjamin 255). Revolutionary nostalgia does not obsess over the image of a
lost past and long for some return to that illusory harmonious state, but rather
places the present “moment of danger” in a provocative constellation with the
threats of the past, while entertaining a messianic hope for the revolutionary
potential of the present. This breaks the stagnant and oppressive “homogenous,
empty time” of the “continuum of history” (261). In the case of Vineland, this
“moment of danger” occurs at the height of the Reagan presidency with the War
on Drugs and the return of Brock Vond.
In an insightful discussion of Benjamin’s notion of historical repetition, Žižek
contends that the description of a linear series of “historical epochs” (the fifties,
the sixties, etc.) risks falling into the trap of historicism. He argues that his-
toricism contains a deleterious “blind spot,” an “unhistorical traumatic kernel
which returns as the Same through all historical epochs” (Enjoy 81), namely
class struggle. Accordingly, Benjamin’s concept of historical repetition holds
the key to overcoming the loss of the historical sense:

the only way to save historicity from the fall into historicism, into the notion
of the linear series of “historical epochs,” is to conceive these epochs as a
series of ultimately failed attempts to deal with the same “unhistorical”
traumatic kernel (in Marxism, this kernel is of course class struggle, class
antagonism)—in short, to conceive the founding gesture of each new epoch
as repetition in the precise Kierkegaardian-Benjaminian sense. (81)

The “founding gesture” of each of the historical epochs depicted in Vineland is

the repeated designation of a particular enemy of the nation in a failed attempt
to deal with the traumatic kernel of class struggle—communists in the fifties,
student radicals and hippies in the sixties, and drug users in the eighties. The
novel’s revolutionary nostalgia does not constitute a vacuous longing to return
to some edenic sixties, but an attempt to come to terms with the ambivalent
historical legacy of the decade, primarily through the exploration of Prairie
Wheeler’s “inheritance.” Vineland avoids the compensatory function of ordi-
nary nostalgia by grounding its historical sense in the repetition of the failure
of radical political movements in the history of the Traverse-Becker family.
Specifically, the novel traces the shifting terrain of the class struggle through
four generations: the struggle of the Wobblies to unionize the logging industry

212 CRITIQUE
in California, the hysteria of McCarthyism and Hollywood blacklists, the anti-
Vietnam War movement, and Reagan’s Revolution and the War on Drugs. The
dilemma for Pynchon is to find an adequate form for this revolutionary nostalgia
that connects the “tradition of the oppressed” with the political present in an era
characterized by the loss of historical sense.
The most notorious formal element of Vineland is the pervasive presence of
popular culture, especially the way in which television invades the narrative.
Deborah Madsen, for instance, argues that the novel “imitates the form of a
television programme” with its “short, discrete episodes, related through flash-
back and connected by shifts of angle, fading in and out of different scenes of
action” (132). Hanjo Berressem suggests that television generates the novel’s
“mode of writing” in the readily identifiable genres in which Pynchon frames
the various narrative episodes:
Besides simply mentioning film and TV, the writing also makes use of the
structures of several cinematic genres: the docudrama, when the story of
the Hollywood blacklistings is retold; the horror movie, which defines the
Thanatoid subplot; the karate movie, which defines the parameters of DL’s
world; the war movie, which is a model for Vond’s raid on Vineland; the
Mafia movie, which is related to Ralph Wayvone; and the monster movie,
which defines Takeshi’s relation to the “unrelenting forces.” Similarly, the
writing uses TV models such as the sitcom, which defines most of the humor
of the book. (236)

To this television inventory of stock genres, we could add a few literary ones
to give further evidence of the multiplicity of narrative forms employed by
Pynchon: cyberpunk, which provides a model for DL Chastain in the ass-
kicking figure of Molly from William Gibson’s Neuromancer; myth, which
informs the embedded stories of Lilith and the woge; and magical realism,
which inspires the everyday depiction of the spectral Thanatoids, as well as the
conception of Vineland as a crossroads where several different worlds intersect.10
Finally, Brian McHale argues that Pynchon’s technique of “zapping” between
programs with its “heightened, intensified flow” represents a “good scale-model
or mise-en-abyme of postmodernist ontological plurality” (133). For McHale,
then, the novel provides a “quixotic cognitive enterprise” through its innovative
use of televisual forms: “By representing the ontological plurality of TV, and
its pluralizing effect on the world of which it forms a part, Pynchon seeks
to model the ontological plurality of postmodern culture itself, including the
final, intractable ontological difference, the ultimate limit to all modeling and
all representation, death” (141). Regardless of whether or not the incorporation
of these televisual forms generates anything significantly new on the postmodern
literary horizon, the narrative requires a familiarity with television to make sense
of both its form and content.
In this regard, the novel’s television trivia gags enjoy a peculiar status, for if
one gets the joke, generally the ridiculous discrepancy between the actor and the

VOL. 51, NO. 3 213

title role, for instance, The Bryant Gumbel Story starring John Ritter (Vineland
355), then one obviously has fallen prey to the distraction offered by television.
This procedure signals a slight departure from Pynchon’s gnostic practice of
positing a hidden knowledge that separates the elect from the preterite, for in
this reconfigured cultural sphere, knowledge betokens one’s fallen status, not
one’s election. One of the novel’s unique strategies hinges upon this useless
knowledge, resembling an “estrangement effect” whereby the foreclosed history
of a radical political culture is juxtaposed with the cultural garbage of an all-
too-familiar television culture (Hawaii Five-O, CHiPs, The Smurfs, Gilligan’s
Island, etc.). Vineland produces a certain discomfort in the realization that the
television history seems far more familiar than the history of the various labor
movements and political struggles discussed. Of course, this is precisely the
point the novel conveys in regard to television’s role as distraction; the loss of
historical sense is tied to our collective preoccupation with television.
The inevitable question then arises of the political implications of this narrative
technique. Does Pynchon’s reliance upon television in the novel signal a damning
complicity with the forces of late capitalism? Or does his formal adoption of
TV represent a homeopathic technique designed, as Jameson argues, to “undo
postmodernism [: : : ] by the methods of postmodernism [: : : ] to reconquer
some genuine historical sense by using the instruments of what I have called
substitutes of history” (qtd. in Stephanson 59)? McHale’s redemptive reading
of the use of television in Vineland as a form of cognitive mapping posits a
correspondence between TV and social reality in the sense of accurately reflect-
ing the ontological plurality of postmodern existence. Yet Pynchon launches a
rather Frankfurt School-esque critique of television as an ideological means of
manipulation. The rationale for Hector Zuñiga’s revisionary antidrug film of the
sixties presumes such an ideological project. Hector informs Zoyd that he has
“Hollywood connections,” specifically Ernie Triggerman, a name that plays with
the novel’s linkage of the camera and the gun. Ernie would like to capitalize on
the imminent move of the “Nostalgia Wave” into the sixties, “which according
to his demographics is the best time most people from back then are ever goín
to have in their life—sad for them maybe, but not for the picture business.”
Hector then lays out the premise of his film:

Our dream, Ernie’s and mine, is to locate a legendary observer-participant

from those times, Frenesi Gates—your ex-ol’ lady, Zoyd, your mom,
Prairie—and bring her up out of her mysterious years of underground
existence, to make a Film about all those long-ago political wars, the drugs,
the sex, the rock an’ roll, which th’ ultimate message will be that the real
threat to America, then and now, is from th’ illegal abuse of narcotics? (51)

Not surprisingly, the culture industry works hand in hand with the countersub-
versive tradition to construct the spectral apparitions that cement the latter’s
hegemony.

214 CRITIQUE
 However, Pynchon distances himself from this purely manipulative take on
television by crediting the American public with being more than the mere dupes
of the ruling class, since nearly all of the characters voice their criticism of the
medium. According to Mucho Maas, television is the preeminent distraction
factory and is responsible for the failure of his generation to retain the lessons
of the sixties: “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 [: : : ] 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” (Vineland 314). This comment encapsulates
Jameson’s argument linking the loss of historical sense to the social and spatial
confusion of the postmodern hyperspace.11 A more malevolent take on the co-
optive power of television comes from the adolescent Isaiah Two Four: “Whole
problem ’th you folks’s generation [: : : ] is you believed in your Revolution, put
your lives right out there for it—but you sure didn’t understand much about the
Tube. 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 1970 dollars—it was way too cheap” (373). Television co-opts the
revolutionary energies of the sixties and channels them into a cool medium that
successfully stifles those radical impulses. Far from encouraging ontological
plurality, then, TV homogenizes its audience on the level of activity and negates
change by fostering complacency and regression.
The novel’s critique of television addresses more than distraction and the
accompanying loss of historical sense. In the hands of the State, television
is the principal tool for the creation of hegemony, inculcating the ideological
fantasy supporting the symbolic order into the minds of its citizens. To borrow
Louis Althusser’s formulation of ideology, television is the primary ideological
state apparatus that conveys the “imaginary relationship” the State wants its
citizens to entertain toward their “real conditions of existence” (162). The
narratives and genres found on television enable individuals to identify with
a “symbolic mandate,” a role within a coherent and meaningful symbolic order.
Pynchon’s argument extends beyond the impact of television upon the individual
to encompass the entirety of American society, and McHale hits upon this crucial
ideological dimension: “But it is not just the characters whose behavior conforms
(or fails to conform) to TV models, and not just the characters’ consciousnesses
that are shaped by TV. Rather, the very world of Vineland, the outside ’real
world’ existing independently of any particular character’s consciousness of it,
is itself modeled on TV” (135). The ideological function of television is more
insidious than merely a distraction from, or the distortion of, social reality, i.e.,
false consciousness. Rather, television structures our social reality.12
Nowhere is this logic of ideological interpellation through the medium of tele-
vision and its connection to social fantasy more visible than in the Tube addict,
Hector Zuñiga, whose experience of social reality runs like “a genre right-wing

VOL. 51, NO. 3 215

weekly TV Guide called Crime Drama” (Vineland 345).13 In conversation with
this DEA agent turned aspiring filmmaker, Frenesi notices how the distinction
between television and reality is blurred for Hector and how his personality is
a bricolage of famous TV cops:

It was disheartening to see how much he depended on these Tubal fantasies

about his profession, relentlessly pushing their propaganda message of cops-
are-only-human-got-to-do-their-job, turning agents of government repres-
sion into sympathetic heroes. Nobody thought it was peculiar anymore, no
more than the routine violations of constitutional rights these characters
performed week after week, now absorbed into the vernacular of American
expectations. (345)

Television provides Hector with a symbolic mandate, a role within the sym-
bolic order that bestows meaning on his work. More importantly, this passage
describes the ideological effect of television on American society. Social reality
is nothing if not “the vernacular of American expectations,” that fragile and
malleable consensus that frames our lived experience.
Madsen describes the flashback as a formal device of television, but she
misses a crucial feature of the novel’s use of this narrative technique. The
flashbacks in Vineland are almost exclusively conveyed, unlike TV, from person
to person as a form of storytelling, distinctly opposed to the isolated reception
and generically standardized forms utilized by television. Prairie learns about
her mother Frenesi in a series of stories told by her father, DL Chastain, and
Weed Atman. These storytelling episodes form the flashbacks, producing the
possibility for revolutionary nostalgia as the disparate historical moments are
juxtaposed. Pynchon’s narrative apparatus deploys the “gestures and signals
of the storyteller” in an attempt “to restore the coordinates of a face-to-face
storytelling institution which has been effectively disintegrated” far beyond
what Benjamin imagined as the consequences of the emergence of the “printed
book” by the “commodification of literature and culture” in television (Jameson,
Political Unconscious 154–55).
The ideological and political stakes of storytelling as a form were developed
by Benjamin in an essay entitled “The Storyteller.” For Benjamin, the story
is a repository for the collective experience of a community, its tradition. He
argues that the “decline of storytelling” and “the rise of the novel” (87) entail
the transition to a different mode of production and reception centering around
the isolated individual, as opposed to the collective situation of storytelling:
“The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to
express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself
uncounseled, and cannot counsel others. [: : : ] In the midst of life’s fullness,
and through the representation of this fullness, the novel gives evidence of the
profound perplexity of the living” (87). Removed from the collective experience
that is the repository of communal knowledge (the symbolic network in which

216 CRITIQUE
meaning arises), the novel grapples with the “meaning of life” in its attempt to
transcend the subject’s overwhelming experience of “perplexity” (99). Benjamin
points out that even as the storyteller vanishes from sight, the novel itself wages a
losing struggle against “information” (88), the product of the press. Information
comes predigested; its “prime requirement is that it appear ‘understandable in
itself”’ (89). More importantly, information has a short shelf life: “The value of
information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at
that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without
losing any time” (90). Thus, information both reflects and produces a temporality
at odds with historical memory and the tradition that the art of the storyteller
helps to constitute and perpetuate.
What are the stakes of storytelling in Vineland? Storytelling represents the
means by which the “tradition of the oppressed” circulates within a society
in which it has become officially foreclosed. Benjamin envisions tradition as
a testament to the various forms of oppression inherent to official history, as
in his famous declaration that “[t]here is no document of civilization which is
not at the same time a document of barbarism” (256). Benjamin also conceives
of tradition as a social process characterized by barbarism in its transmission:
“And just as such a document is not free of barbarism, barbarism taints also the
manner in which it was transmitted from one owner to another” (256). In its
transmission of experience, storytelling testifies to what is repressed by official
history, knowledge dramatically illustrated in Weed Atman’s “law enforcement
epiphany”:

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 police was being revealed to him. “They’re
breaking people’s heads?” (Vineland 206–07)

Weed Atman’s experience at a “moment of danger” snaps him from a comforting

fantasy of law enforcement as the benevolent shepherds of American society to
a reality in which a repressive state apparatus eliminates internal dissension
through violence. Moreover, Vineland subscribes to Benjamin’s view of history
as “a state of emergency” (257) with an ever-surveilling State poised to descend
upon its citizens. As in Gravity’s Rainbow, paranoia becomes a survival skill
within this dangerous reality. Yet this social reality appears to be dictated as
much by contingency as it is by conspiracy, arbitrariness as much as sinister
purpose. The whims of the State furnish its victims, Frenesi Gates and Zoyd
Wheeler, in particular, with a vacillating environment of normalcy and danger
in which the rules change as frequently as administrations. The opportunistic
and erratic enactment of the power of the State, despite the long-term deals it
makes with Frenesi and Zoyd, reinforces its affinity with fascism.

VOL. 51, NO. 3 217

 

Pynchon employs storytelling to bear witness to the history of the oppressed,

thereby practicing what Derrida calls a “politics of memory” (xix) that is the anti-
dote to the American versions of fascism, McCarthyism, the Nixonian Reaction,
and the Reagan Revolution. This “politics of memory” salvages the forgotten
history of the struggling classes in their diverse historical forms. The novel
forges this connection by equating the Thanatoids with memory: “What was a
Thanatoid, at the end of the long dread day, but memory?” (Vineland 325).
Vineland advocates revolutionary nostalgia, and this “active remembrance
as a ritual summoning and invocation of the traditions of the oppressed in
violent constellation with the political present” (Eagleton, Against the Grain
136) contains an “emancipatory promise” for the future. Midway through the
novel, Frenesi dreams about the crystallization of such revolutionary moments
in her own experience:

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 being 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. Some were in it, in fact, secretly for the possibilities of
finding just such moments. (Vineland 117–18)

While viewing the first moments of the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll
captured by Frenesi’s film, Prairie experiences a similar feeling of revolutionary
possibilities: “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” (210).
Vineland reaffirms its faith in a justice and emancipation yet to come in Jess
Traverse’s “annual reading of a passage from Emerson”: “Secret retributions are
always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible
to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors 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 and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or
be pulverized by the recoil” (369). The novel stages this “secret retribution,”
delivering on its emancipatory promise of justice with the demise of Brock
Vond. A chance automobile accident delivers him into the hands of Blood and
Vato, two Vietnam vets with a score to settle, and they take him to Tsorrek, the
land of the dead, where Vond’s symbolic debt is paid in full.

218 CRITIQUE
 More importantly, Pynchon, like Derrida, locates the actual conspiracy in
the construction of hegemony wherein the conjuration of the specters of Marx
produces real ghosts. Vineland counters the loss of historical sense accompanying
the transition to late capitalism by seeking that “commerce without commerce of
ghosts” of which Derrida speaks. These specters are exorcised “not in order to
chase away the ghosts, but this time to grant them the right, if it means making
them come back alive, as revenants who would no longer be revenants, but as
other arrivants to whom a hospitable memory or promise must offer welcome”
(Derrida 175). The novel depicts this spectral reconciliation in the final pages
as Prairie and Weed enjoy a conversation that finally strays from the Thanatoid
obsession with resentment, retribution, and revenge.
Pynchon’s vision of American history as repetition has proven to be discon-
certingly prophetic, and this is one reason why the novel should not be dismissed.
The Bush administration reawakened comparisons with fascism on several fronts
in the War on Terror: the cynical construction of the conspiratorial enemy,
preemptive wars, the curtailment of domestic civil rights and freedoms (the
PATRIOT Act), secret overseas prison systems to bypass antitorture regulations
and other harsh interrogation techniques, and prison camps to detain “enemy
combatants” without legal rights. In an era of globalization, the countersubver-
sive tradition has gone global itself, seeking its conspiratorial agencies abroad.
That these conspiracies actually exist, that the threat of Al-Qaeda is real, should
not deter us from recognizing the cynical ways in which the War on Terror
has been used to regulate domestic politics, to structure the post-9/11 social
reality in such a way as to curtail dissent and obfuscate the machinations of
the “Real Ones,” to borrow Pynchon’s terminology. This retrospective view
of Vineland encourages readers to view the recent War on Terror not as an
aberration, the temporary departure from the democratic norm, but rather as one
more “catastrophe [: : : ] piling wreckage upon wreckage” (Benjamin 257) upon
American history.

U NIVERSITY OF S OUTH DAKOTA

V ERMILLION , S OUTH DAKOTA

NOTES

1. Rogin counters the influential historical account of the American conspiratorial mind at work
offered by Richard Hofstadter in The Paranoid Style in American Politics, which isolated the
appearance of conspiracy theory in “politically marginal or culturally provincial populist groups”
(273). Hofstadter claims that the paranoid style “has been the preferred style only of minority
movements” (7). Other historians have also expressed skepticism regarding this assertion. Gordon
S. Wood critiques Hofstadter’s argument in his reconsideration of the conspiratorial thinking of
the Revolutionary period in American history: “By leaving the Revolution out of his story and
by assuming that the ‘paranoid style’ was ‘the preferred style only of minority movements’ and

VOL. 51, NO. 3 219

marginal elements in American society, Hofstadter avoided the troubling implications of describing
the Revolutionaries as paranoid personalities” (404).
2. For the definitive collection of Marxist responses to Derrida’s Specters of Marx, see the volume
edited by Michael Sprinker, Ghostly Demarcations: A Symposium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of
Marx. The controversial passage from Derrida, cited frequently by the contributors to this volume,
is the following:

To continue to take inspiration from a certain spirit of Marxism would be to keep faith
with what has always made of Marxism in principle and first of all a radical critique,
namely a procedure ready to undertake its self-critique. This critique wants itself
to be in principle and explicitly open to its own transformation, re-evaluation, self-
reinterpretation. [: : : ] We would distinguish this spirit from other spirits of Marxism,
those that rivet it to the body of Marxist doctrine, to its supposed systemic, meta-
physical, or ontological totality (notably to its “dialectical method” or to “dialectical
materialism”), to its fundamental concepts of labor, mode of production, social class,
and consequently to the whole history of its apparatuses (projected or real: The
Internationals of the labor movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the single
party, the State, and finally the totalitarian monstrosity). (88)

This renunciation of “Marxist doctrine” leads Terry Eagleton to deride Derrida’s reconstitution of
Marx’s legacy as “Marxism without Marxism” (“Marxism” 86).
3. For a clear and concise discussion of Lacan’s interpretation of the “Dream of the Burning
Child,” see Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 44–45.
4. For Pynchon, the fantasy construction of the enemy as a purely instrumental strategy represents
the fundamental correspondence between Reagan’s America and fascism. The difficulty with Pyn-
chon’s appraisal of the Reagan Revolution as an intensified and conspiratorial “state of emergency,”
however, is that his rhetoric sounds disconcertingly similar to the acutely paranoid narratives formed
by right-wing militia movements. The renegade Brock Vond and his traveling grand juries, along with
the repressive state apparatus known as the DEA, anticipate the paranoid representation of Attorney
General Janet Reno and the ATF, those “jackbooted thugs” who allegedly attack patriotic citizens
merely exercising their God-given right to bear arms. The discomforting proximity of Pynchon to
the militia movements points to the apparent Möbius band-like spectrum of subject-positions in
which if one pushes the left-wing far enough, one emerges on the right-wing, or vice-versa, as Pat
Buchanan’s bewildering populist campaign in the 1996 presidential race demonstrated. Is Pynchon’s
distrust of the fascist government any different from similar claims made by militia leaders? The
difference between Pynchon and the militia movements involves the tradition upon which they base
their claims. For the militia movements, this tradition is described as the American way of life,
which must be protected from the subversive threat posed by the Other (minorities of every stamp,
Jews, communists, homosexuals, etc.). For Pynchon, this tradition is the “history of the oppressed,”
the victims of the countersubversive tradition. Lest we forget, though, these militia groups have
their own martyrs (David Koresh) and traumatic events (Ruby Ridge and Waco) with which to
weave their own history of oppression. The point is not to trace some secret identity in the apparent
nonidentity of these two traditions, but rather to see how these two very different accounts imply
a “hidden reference to a constant [: : : ] a traumatic kernel, a fundamental antagonism,” in other
words, “an imbalance in social relations that prevent[s] the community from stabilizing itself into
a harmonious whole” (Žižek, “Spectre” 26). These rival historical narratives of oppression “are
simply two mutually exclusive endeavours to cope with this traumatic antagonism” (26). Through
exclusionary practices, militias seek to return to a lost era of social harmony. Through inclusionary
practices, Pynchon envisions a social harmony that is yet to come. And this openness to utopian
possibility signals his alliance with the messianism of Benjamin.
5. For an excellent discussion of Vineland and its treatment of the history of the New Left, see
Sandra Baringer’s The Metanarrative of Suspicion in Late Twentieth-Century America, 89–102.
6. Jameson develops this particular argument in the first chapter of The Geopolitical Aesthetic:
Cinema and Space in the World System. For an overview and extension of Jameson’s analysis
of conspiracy theory, see my own essay, “Spinning Paranoia: The Ideologies of Paranoia and
Contingency in Postmodern Culture,” 21–39.

220 CRITIQUE
 7. For the definition of the “invisible Master” and a discussion of the ideological function of this
figure, see Slavoj Žižek’s “‘I Hear You with My Eyes’: or, the Invisible Master,” 90–126.
8. Jameson first proposes cognitive mapping as the necessary response to the social and spatial
confusion accompanying the transition into multinational capitalism in Postmodernism, or, the
Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism 50–54. However, he further explains his use of cognitive mapping
in “Cognitive Mapping,” 347–60.
9. Jameson makes this argument regarding the myth of the mafia in contemporary American
culture. The criminality of organized crime serves as a scapegoat for the social ills of society,
problems that Jameson attributes to the capitalist system itself. See Signatures of the Visible 30–34.
10. Magical realism makes a playful appearance in the novel’s episode of storytelling parrots
smuggled into Vineland: “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 [: : : ]” (223).
11. For more on Jameson’s analysis of postmodernism, see his landmark study Postmodernism,
or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
12. In true Brechtian fashion, Vineland starts with the “bad new things” rather than the “good
old things” to recuperate a radical “tradition.” The encyclopedic pop cultural references establish a
shared code for a certain recognizable community (a feature that figures prominently in Generation
X culture). The critical difference between Pynchon’s deployment of this degraded cultural form and
the virtual celebration of such “detritus” in the neoregionalism blasted by Jameson in The Seeds of
Time is that television does not serve a “compensatory ideology” in which “the microscopic and the
inconsequential” are affirmed “as the space of real life” (148–49). For Pynchon, television frames
our experience of social reality according to a multiplicity of genres (cop show, sitcom, movie of
the week). More importantly, television masks, defuses, and domesticates the social antagonisms
chronicled in the alternative history of the Traverse-Becker family.
13. Of course, television also frames Frenesi’s desire for uniformed authority, notoriously ex-
hibited when she masturbates to an episode of CHiPs and her fantasy explodes into reality as a
handsome deputy in uniform appears at her door to deliver her last government check.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Skip Willman is an associate professor at the University of South Dakota. He has published
essays on the work of Don DeLillo, Stanley Elkin, and Ian Fleming, as well as the ideologies of
conspiracy theory. He is the co-editor (along with Edward P. Comentale and Stephen Watt) of Ian
Fleming and James Bond: The Cultural Politics of James Bond.

222 CRITIQUE
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