Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 4
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“The Transfenestrational Imaginary: Periodizing Vineland’s Sixties” / Johanna Isaacson
Abstract
"The Transfenestrational Imaginary: Periodizing Vineland's Sixties" argues that the representational strategy in Vineland has much in
common with Fredric Jameson's sixties periodization strategy, and offers a sustained analogy between narrative strategy and historiography. I suggest
that Vineland is most productively seen as a continuation of the anti-literary genres of the sixties underground press and manifesto forms,
genres that were necessarily temporary and politicized, and became opaque when separated from the context of active political social movements. The
paper focuses on two key figures in the novel, Frenesi Gates and Zoyd Wheeler, and argues that the two are associated with the manifesto form and the
underground press respectively. Frenesi embodies both the idealistic and recuperative elements of sixties discourse, with neither identity canceling
out the other, but rather demonstrating the impasse of her position as a leftist and a feminist in a post-sixties historical conjuncture. Zoyd forms
her passive, comic other associated with the easy-going countercultural humor and culture-saturated forms of the Underground Press. The dyad represents
both the inflationary "superstructural credit" of the sixties and the complication of historicizing the decade's "failures." I argue that the novel
develops a strategy of "irrealism" in order to tackle these impasses. Against the critical consensus on Vineland, I argue that the novel is
neither transparent nor transcendent. Instead, Vineland's representational strategies point to a form of historical narrative that no
longer attempts to produce "some vivid representation of history as it really happened," but rather to produce the concept history, a requisite of
Jameson's periodizing politics.
The Transfenestrational Imaginary: Periodizing Vineland's Sixties*
<1> In the Oxford English Dictionary, the verb "fenestrate" is defined as "To furnish (a bandage) with small holes or openings." "Defenestration" is defined as "the act of throwing out of a window." Thomas Pynchon's neologism, "transfenestrate," has been entered into the dubious arena of the "Wiktionary" as "to eject or throw (someone or something) through a closed window," the yearly action taken by the character Zoyd Wheeler as a media spectacle and declaration of independence from the encroaching, authoritarian Reaganite eighties. This neologism, which accompanies Zoyd as a trickster figure, will stand here for Pynchon's strategy of representation which eludes both narratives of recantation and nostalgia, and refrains from both naturalistic realist and poststructuralist deconstructive approaches. I will argue that this strategy is indicative of a lineage in which the utopian kernal of sixties forms of refusal are preserved, and that this lineage is now blossoming in emerging Marxist feminist visions of work refusal, such as that of Kathi Weeks in her groundbreaking reframing of utopian counterculture lineages, The Problem with Work. Vineland advances the categories of eventfulness, anti-work and feminist utopianism, and offers a way to rethink narratives of sixties "successes" and "failures."
<2> To start with, Vineland's representational strategy derives from a vision of history that has much in common with Fredric Jameson's sixties periodization strategy. In both of these framings postmodernism is seen as the dominant logic generated by the 1970s onset of a new wave of capitalist social relations and contradictions. Pynchon shows the sixties as a moment that gave rise to counterculture typologies, characterized by disinvestment in the modes of competition, masculinity, violence, monogamy, ratiocination, bureaucracy and adherence to the work regime that characterized a previous period of Fordism. However, at the same time that these possibilities arise, they are sublated by new political realities. Thus, sixties typicality, marked by what Christopher Connery has called "sixties time," a momentary defiance of ratiocinated and teleological time, and which Jameson refers to as a "universal liberation, a global unbinding of energies," is a guiding referent for all forms of representation in the novel.
<3> The sixties periodization I refer to above starts from the premise that: "history is necessity…that the sixties had to happen the way it did, and that its opportunities and failures were inextricably intertwined, marked by the objective constraints and openings of a determinate historical situation" ("Periodizing" 178). Jameson reads the sixties as an exhaustion of a previous wave of capitalism, an exhaustion arising out of the crisis of class identification in the wake of waning radical unions and communist party politics ("Periodizing" 182). This shift inaugurates a postlapserian era in which "culture itself falls into the world, and the result is not its disappearance but its prodigious expansion, to the point where culture becomes coterminous with social life in general" ("Periodizing" 201). This is tantamount to what Guy Debord calls "the society of the spectacle," the colonization of everyday life by culture itself. Jameson periodizes the end of the sixties as 1972-1974, marked, in the United States, by the end of the antiwar movement, the dominance of multinational capitalism, worldwide economic crisis and the reemergence of anti-sixties cultural authority ("Periodizing" 206). For Jameson, following Ernest Mandel, this crisis is the culmination of a 20 to 25 year "Kondratiev wave," marking a transformation in productive technology ("Periodizing" 206). This transformation follows the euphoria of the sixties in which this expansion of culture was experienced as a heady moment of infinite possibility. Jameson sees the sixties as a moment of social fission when the breakdown of older social forms led to "the release of molecular energies, the unbinding of material signifiers" ("Periodizing" 208). The sixties thus constitutes the utopian kernal that ballasts the closures of capitalist global expansion, producing the hope for a "realm of freedom and voluntarist possibility beyond the classical constraints of the economic infrastructure" ("Periodizing" 208). The counterculture itself "had to happen" and was not in itself a failure but rather "an immense and inflationary issuing of superstructural credit; a universal abandonment of the referential gold standard" ("Periodizing" 208). The eighties is then a period where these "infrastructural bills slowly come due." However, residual sixties-based energies and forms of representation constitute a response to the "so called crisis of Marxism," the notion that Marxist forms of class analysis have been obviated ("Periodizing" 208). The proliferation of new subjects of history and the adaptability of class struggle against the enduring aspects of capitalism -- exploitation, extraction of surplus value, proletarianization -- signify the endurance of resistance and the need for a recalibrated Marxist form of analysis.
<4> This implicit historiography can be seen in Pynchon's contemporaries who also derive their themes from the counterculture by way of what Raymond Williams refers to as a "structure of feeling." For example, Robert Stone's 1981 novel A Flag for Sunrise, figures its own representational horizon as a powerful but unsustainable experience of commitment to revolutionary transformation. The novel is set in a fictional Central American country reminiscent of Nicaragua and El Salvador and the characters (many of whom were also active in Vietnam) are caught in a cold war struggle in which impassioned revolutionary guerillas are thwarted by both CIA suppression and Soviet authoritarianism. Here Stone depicts a bleak world, but one which contains transcendent moments of revolutionary ardor, as in the martyred nun Justin who gives her life for revolution. This idea of sixties as representational source and horizon can also be seen in Don DeLillo's 1991 novel Mao II in which a writer searching for meaning is intractably drawn into the eye of a mortal violence that is ambiguously figured as either terrorist or revolutionary.
<5> These literary reclamations of the sixties have implications for the possibilities of representation. They suggest that a future-oriented "realism" cannot take the form of transparency nor can it reject the materiality of the present. In Vineland, this strategy draws on both the vivacity and the deterioration of counterculture vernaculars in order to posit a third, dialectical way to oppose the binary of transparent and opaque representation. Many critics see Vineland as a failure of periodization due to its seemingly "transparent" nostalgia for the sixties and political polemics against the eighties. Vineland is most productively seen as a continuation of the anti-literary genres of sixties underground press and manifesto forms, genres that were necessarily temporary and politicized, and became opaque when separated from the context of active political social movements. Thus, while it may be true that the novel is less dazzling and ambitious in its reach than such universally admired novels as Gravity's Rainbow, what Joseph Tabbi criticizes in Vineland as "Pynchon's Groundward Art," can be productively read as a compliment to these more complex novels that enriches our understanding of their sense of historiography, rather than as a negligible or minor work (Tabbi). As in Kristin Ross's reading of Rimbaud's poetry in relation to political slogans and the radical social space of the Paris Commune, Vineland draws its literary energies from anti-literary sources, sources that leave a residue of political memory and political futurity. Thus, critics who take aim at Vineland as a lesser work by Pynchon, a failure of literary postmodernism, miss this anti-literary genesis and strategy.
<6> Stefan Mattessich argues that the oblique relationship of Pynchon's earlier novels to the sixties allow them a formal adequacy to their
moment which Vineland lacks (5). He links linguistic allusiveness, "a preterite language that elides and eludes" to theoretical engagement
with post-war historical impasses and sees Vineland's direct engagement with the sixties as, in some ways, an anti-intellectual escapism from
theory itself (2). For Mattessich, the counterculture is affiliated with "reverie" which translates to "discursive neutralizations that made the
counterculture an experiment in complicity" (207). However, by conflating the counterculture with all other forms of discourse, Mattessich obscures its
specificity. As Jameson and Connery argue, first world counterculture, though inflationary, has a dimension which is structurally homologous to global
sixties uprisings. Critics such as Kristin Ross and Henri Lefebvre have argued that much of the structuralist and language-centered theory that arose
in the wake of such events as the Paris uprisings of 1968 reified and denied the revolutionary aspirations of the moment. Ross, Lefebvre, Alain Badiou,
Herbert Marcuse, Guy Debord, Fredric Jameson, and others foreground the category of eventfulness in their post-sixties critical theory and in these
theories the reification of counterculture discourse is seen dialectically, as both suppressive and retentive of social energies and impulses toward
conjunctural change (Badiou 2005, Jameson 1984, Lefebvre 1969, Marcuse 1969, Ross 2002, Situationist Internationale 1981).
<7> Mattessich's critique of Vineland is that its supposed immediacy and lack of attention to the ideology of form converges with an anti-theoretical trend, "a reaction against 'language' and 'theory' in practice" (209). Two assumptions lie at the heart of this critique of Vineland. One is that the particular formal strategy directed through "the elliptical, digressive, or virtual" is always diagnostic rather than unreflexively symptomatic (210). The second assumption is that Vineland itself is more transparent and less allusive than Pynchon's other works. Intentionally or not, both of these assumptions reflect a formal reaction to New Left and counterculture forms of expression whose political implications go unstated.
<8> This habitual framing of the legacy of sixties propogandistic and overtly political forms is theorized by Kristin Ross in her account of the "afterlives" of 1968 uprisings in Paris. For Ross, this moment of "eventfulness" created a temporary merging of art and life that was followed by "social amnesia" (May '68 1). In popular mythology, the nuances of this form of "political culture" and sociabilities are forgotten and instead, this period is qualified as a crisis or trauma, which is set against "the stabilities of the habitus" (3). In this framing, eventfulness is pathologized or villainized. For Ross these narratives of the sixties themselves "could perhaps themselves be seen as a symptom, a generalized reluctance to consider the very notion of politics or collective political agency in the present" (3). Her counter-reading of this moment is that its escape from specialization and hierarchy can be understood through the refractions of its cultural production. During the '68 uprisings artists gave up their specialized roles and joined in the practice of revolt. This resulted in a moment where forms of cultural production that required much time, resources, and expertise gave way to more ephemeral and immediate forms of artistic techniques (15).
<9> This expanded understanding of politicized formal experiment and its relation to eventfulness suggests a critique or a need to refine Mattesich's claim that:
Vineland does not perform its own content, the novel is about preterite characters dealing with their own desires for order, their complicities in power, their human weakness, but it is not itself preterite (212).
With Ross's framing we can rethink the novel's use of free indirect discourse, bricolage, and politicized counterculture vernaculars derived from slang, the manifesto and the underground press, as a needed supplement to post-modern forms of representation.
<10> In contrast to Mattessich, Judith Chambers argues that the language of Vineland is not transparent but embodies what Walter Benjamin describes as a mimetic impulse, a bricolage of current phenomena harboring "traces of real experience" (200). In this view, Vineland's aesthetic does not simply estrange the real world, but estranges the postmodern reader's expectation that the real world is inaccessible, working to "disrupt and confound the sophisticated postmodern audience, which has come to expect a countergenre that plays with language and actively avoids the common tongues" (201). In this framing, Pynchon's view of the sixties is seen to be neither moralistic nor romanticizing. Instead, it encompasses a kind of speculative realism, navigating what Herbert Marcuse refers to as "counter-revolution and revolt," the foreclosure of and backlash against sixties potentiality.
<11> Frenesi Gates and Zoyd Wheeler are the central sixties figures in the novel and are associated with the manifesto form and the underground press respectively. The manifesto form, as discussed by Louis Althusser, Kathi Weeks, and others, is a directly political genre which loses all traction, or worse, becomes its opposite, when it outlives its political moment. Frenesi embodies both the idealistic and recuperative elements of this sixties discourse, with neither identity canceling out the other, but rather the two forming a dialectical synthesis, an aufheben, demonstrating the impasse of her position as a leftist and a feminist in a post-sixties historical conjuncture. Her conversion from left wing guerilla filmmaker to right wing snitch is something other than a simple "bad faith" retreat from politics, but rather frames her as a doomed, historical inevitability, a discarded remnant of the "inflated moment of the superstructure." Frenesi's dialectical identity is further complicated by the dyad she forms with her ex-husband Zoyd Wheeler. If Frenesi is the manifesto form --- an active, action-oriented discourse whose demise is tragic, Zoyd forms her passive, comic other associated with the easy-going countercultural humor and culture-saturated forms of the Underground Press. Historically, this genre did not go through an abrupt reversal at the end of the sixties but rather faded out and became comically impotent. Zoyd does not betray his sixties ideals, and yet, it is unclear whether he could sustain these ideals without the persistent memory of Frenesi's intensity. The bumbling, intractably counterculture Zoyd is depicted as a feminized and passive entity that Frenesi rode into "like a whole gang of outlaws" (37). Although his persona is permeated by sixties logic, Zoyd is shown to have been uninvolved with political action, and rather forms a kind of landscape through which the agential Frenesi passes, inverting the traditionally gendered valences of passivity and activity in narrative.[1]
<12> The fission of the active and passive in Frenesi and Zoyd's wedding constitutes a momentary, if inflationary, realization of the possibilities of everyday life, a brief moment of "sixties time" outside of ratiocination:
it may have taken hours or been over in half a minute, there were few if any timepieces among those assembled and nobody seemed restless, this after all being the mellow sixties, a slower moving time, predigital, not yet cut into pieces, not even by television (38).
This captures the prelapsarian, timeless, "beautiful certainty" of the sixties, which is given a proper lament by Zoyd and Mucho Maas later in the novel:
Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. Remember how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time? God I knew then, I knew…
They had a look. "Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die. Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a population that knows it'll never die? When that was always their last big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course they had to take it away from us."
"Yeah, but they can't take what happened, what we found out."
"Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill it up every minute, keep us distracted, it's what the Tube is for…" (313-314).
Here, the windowpane, a private joke/ acid memory between the two men, serves as a counterpoint to the opaque tube which "gives us too much to process" and makes us forget. The window and the process of "transfenestration" opens up, through an overdetermined symbol, the visionary status of sixties time as a point of purchase from the eighties, the latter representing a moment fully colonized by mass media, creating "a second nature of man which ties him libidinally and aggressively to the commodity form" ("An Essay on Liberation" 11).
Zoyd's window back to the sixties is Frenesi. He refuses, despite subsequent pain and separation, to forget the bucolic, edenic moment of their wedding:
Everything in nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as it sounded later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace-- the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm (38).
Yet, this transcendent moment is immediately contextualized and delimited by historical qualification as inseparable from: "War in Vietnam, murder as an instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and death" even if these elements seemed to be "off on some other planet" (38). This moment compares with mythic moments of harmony in the sixties, moments of reconciliation between the Hells Angels and counterculture hippies as seen in Emmett Grogan's sixties memoir Ringolevio. The wedding is depicted as a counterculture idyll, with Frenesi serving as presiding queen, attracting children and animals as if she were a prelapsarian Eve (39). As Frenesi reigns over the scene, she holds a "cone of rainbow-patterned fruit ice whose color miraculously didn't seep together," endowing her with an otherworldly halo of psychedelic colors. And yet, although the scene is rendered vividly, it is already transforming into an image, a monument, as seen in the dress of a cousin which bears the face of sixties musician Frank Zappa, "thus linking her in Zoyd's mind somehow with Mount Rushmore" (39). Zoyd is both intensely present and distant, experiencing the event as something that must be memorialized and monumentalized, something already lost: "He thought, at least try to remember this, try to keep it someplace secure, just her face now in this light, OK, her eyes quiet like this, her mouth poised to open" (39).
<13> In the present of the novel, the eve of Reagan's presidential election, the wedding memories are generally obviated by the demands of the "necessary day" (39). However, their vividness and intensity allows Zoyd to occasionally access an alter-temporality, creating a ghostly simultaneity between the sixties and eighties:
Now and then, when moon, tides and planetary magnetism were all in tune, he went venturing out, straight up through the third eye in his forehead, into an extraordinary system of transport whereby he could go gliding right to wherever she was, and incompletely unseen, sensed just enough to be troublesome, he then would haunt her, for as long as he could, enjoy every squeezed out minute (40).
As Kathi Weeks argues in her reading of Ernst Bloch's utopian realism, the daydream differs from the night dream in its agential nature, communicability, and social content (192). Zoyd's daydream recreates the couple's union as a social fantasy, a beacon and point of purchase from the closure and militarization of eighties paranoia. This view of the daydream as a point of social dreaming contrasts a common reading of counterculture as escapist reverie.
<14> Zoyd's persistence as an outlier to a postmodern mass culture serves as a faded and silly, but still potent, homage to the perfection of the wedding, whose purity, paradoxically, relies on Frenesi's stark Manichaeism. His counterculture dreaming and bumbling embody Marcuse's notion of the cultural dimension as the preserve of utopia, "a realm that both …preserves and transcends its class character. And transcends it, not toward a realm of mere fiction and fantasy, but toward a universe of concrete possibilities" (87-88). At the same time, this realm is "intolerable," acting as "a factor of stabilization in repressive society and thus…itself repressive" (91). Zoyd's playfulness is a sign of an experimental counterculture vernacular that defies the positivism of eighties conservative, anti-drug ideology. Yet Zoyd's cultural resistance, estranged as it is from the politics of the sixties, has lost the identification of play and revolution ("Counter-revolution" 113). It is thus a form of performed desublimation "close to turning into its opposite" ("Counter-revolution" 114).
<15> In this framing Zoyd and Frenesi are similar in their historical typicality. However, whereas Zoyd's fidelity is also a form of impotence, Frenesi represents a darker, starker edge of the sixties, where the counterculture turns abruptly into its opposite, rather than teetering on the brink. Her first meeting with her future partner and lover DL marks her absolute idealism and submission to the political urgencies of the sixties. However, this meeting cannot be directly narrated. Rather, it is represented, as with many of Vineland's sixties narratives, refractorily, through images and recollections. Frenesi's relation to the sixties is dialectical from the start. At the same time she is fully present in the emotions and yearnings that arise in the midst of political action, her ever-present camera distances her; she finds herself "halfway between the people and the police" (116). She frequently describes instances of out of body experience, becoming an "estranged double," Susan Strehle's way of framing Frenesi's tendency to "make her acting self unreal" (104). Frenesi's double visionary status as utopian and cinematographer enables her to "step to the side of her life" (Chambers 198). Her idealism leads her to meld with both the collective and the image, losing sight of her own safety and self. Ultimately, she requires rescue by the more cautious and pragmatic DL, who swoops in on her motorcycle and saves Frenesi from armed police. Following this event, Frenesi and others who were involved in the day's dangerous action find themselves transubstantiated by their political experience:
all their eyes, including ones that had wept, [from tear gas] [were] now lighted from the inside-was it only the overhead fluorescents, some trick of sun and water outside? No... too many of these fevered lamps not to have origin across the line somewhere, in a world sprung new, not even defined yet, worth the loss of nearly everything in this one (117).
Although Frenesi is depicted as overly idealistic and ultimately doomed, the use of free indirect discourse here blurs her position with the narrator's own. As in many points in the novel's idealistic descriptions of sixties political commitment, this creates a fusion of narrative and utopian desire. Although Frenesi's political visions may represent a misperception, what Sianne Ngai calls "bad timing," the problem of coming into discourse in a moment where the only discourse available is one of complicity, or Jameson designates as the "inflationary moment of the superstructure," they point to the superstructure's potentiality, a realism guided by what Ernest Bloch calls "the principle of hope," a visionary, future-orientation towards a more rational form of social organization. Kathi Weeks argues that this sensibility constitutes an alternative ontology and epistemology in which:
If reality encompasses not only what has come to be but also its potential to become other, than utopian thinking, a mode of thought in which reason is allied with the imagination, can count as a particular brand of realism (187).
In this view, reality fluctuates between its history and horizon, rather than serving as a static, unchanging entity: "Realism demands the recognition that there is a future born in every present, and that what it will become is not yet decided" (Weeks 189).
<16> Although Frenesi betrays her friends and is perhaps sacrificed to her own idealism, this utopian futurity sustains these same friends in resistance to what Hite calls "an explicit and articulated They-system" and only offers a ghostly negation of an elusive "we system" (149).
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 (117-118).
Frenesi's Manichaeism here is shown to be a kind of martyrdom, a refusal of gradualism and the muted near future, akin to the unambiguity of the manifesto form.
<17> Frenesi stands in contrast to Zoyd who zones out in the face of impossibility, embracing a dialectical stance of stasis and conciliation. She is also differentiated from DL, who acts pragmatically in the face of current exigencies.[2] In contrast to these two, Frenesi's frenzy drives her to engage with the agential forces of history, and this means leftist uprisings, "superstructural inflation" and the great reharnessing of the image to the interests of capital. Thus Frenesi, as radical cinematographer, will be identified with the intangibility of sixties collectivity and desire, and at the same time with the recolonization of the globe by spectacle. In contrast, DL will be "obliged to approach life in [radical film collective] 24 fps with cold practicality," and this pragmatism impels her to stay away from the visionary, "out of camera range" (195). DL is the needed and unheralded material support, the "tactics and timetable," ballasting Frenesi's dual visionary status. Thus, when the two women are separated, Frenesi becomes untethered from the grounded materialism which gave her idealism direction.
<18> As the material support to sixties idealism unravels, the radical film collectives depicted in the novel lose their positive valence. Thus The Death to the Pig Nihilist Film Kollective's militant manifesto stating "a camera is a gun" is turned in on the movement itself as the camera leads to the assassination of movement leader Weed Atwood, coordinated by Brock Vond with Frenesi as his conduit (197). As Molly Hite argues:
The collective's belief in … the camera eye as the unmediated gaze that sees into the heart of things is a Romantic notion, central to a major sixties aesthetic and deadly to it, inasmuch as it is the frame that controls the gaze and encodes the presuppositions that will inform the image… Photographic evisceration of the image anticipates and guarantees betrayal and death (142).
Hite implies that the camera allows Frenesi to split into a Manichean duality in the name of objectivity and that Frenesi's betrayal is at once a character flaw and an inevitability, as the possibility of voluntarism is always in doubt. As Ben Noys argues:
to truly grasp a concept of collective political agency that can wrest freedom from necessity requires a coordination of will and knowledge, rather than a voluntarism which supposes the will alone as able to break structural constraints (19).
Pynchon represents this concept by refusing transparent nostalgia for the sixties. Rather he provides antinomies that historicize the limits of unmediated will. Frenesi is depicted as a symptom of her own bad timing, as an object of history constructed by historical forces, yet she is not absolved of her sins. This indeterminate stance towards choice and fate contributes to the novel's paranoid logic which navigates the dialectic of revolutionary voluntarism and determinism.
<19> Frenesi thus represents the overdetermination of the sixties, as both generative of an image-obsessed, valueless culture and the source of counterhegemonic images and history. This duality is deepened by her status as a woman who both objectifies others and becomes the object of the male gaze. As Molly Hite has argued, Vineland seems to directly reference Eve Sedgewick's argument in Beteween Men, as Frenesi is passed between right wing Federal Agent Brock Vond and left wing leader Weed Atwood. Hite points out that Frenesi interprets Brock's obsession with using her as a conduit to Weed as homoeroticism while Brock himself explains his obsession in terms of pure power, yet the "narrational tone intimates that both accounts are still reductive and for that reason naïve" (137). But viewed through the lens of the commodity form, Frenesi's activity and passivity are twofold and indeterminate, her conflicting qualities are valences of the boom and bust of a dialectic of "inflationary" superstructure. Frenesi is both subject and object of commodity fetishism, both one who manipulates images and one who stands as an image for the male gaze. As an image that is exchanged "between men," she is "changed into something transcendent," becoming a sublimation of human social energy. Her own social energies are alienated and displaced onto her reified reproduction as an image, a commodity. However, the "definite social relation" inherent in the commodity does not disappear, but rather assumes, "the fantastic form of a relation between things" (Marx 474). Thus Frenesi's "conversion" is not simply a betrayal, but a marker of the utopian kernal in seemingly dystopian forms of reification. In the age of mechanical reproduction, the technology of the image is not static; it is both reified and proleptic with the possibility of new potential for liberation:
For freedom indeed depends largely on technical progress, on the advancement of science. But this fact easily obscures the essential precondition: in order to become vehicles of freedom, science and technology would have to change their present direction and goals; they would have to be reconstructed in accordance with a new sensibility - the demands of the life instincts ("An Essay on Liberation" 19)
Even Brock Vond, the avatar of a sedimented conservative retrenchment, is vulnerable to this feminized social energy. He is both Mr. Rochester and the Mad Woman in the Attic, as he must "furiously repress" his inchoate feminine, generative core (Hites 139).
<20> This dual function of the image as a repository and reification of social relations is shown in the temporal reversal of Frenesi's position as object of exchange "between men." In a longer historical diachrony, we see her as a link in a radical matriarchal chain that includes a Wobblie grandmother and a communist mother, in, as Olster argues "a work whose tale of daughters seeking mothers and mothers returning to homes besieged by interlopers can be viewed as inverting The Odyssey" (127). The logic of the image isolates and alienates these women from each other in the synchronic narrative of the eighties, but the longer historical patterns of their radical activity and intimacy intimates that this condition will go through many more transformations and reversals. Thus, the images created by the 24fps provide Frenesi's daughter, Prairie, with access to fragments of sixties daily life and struggle and this allows her a moment of deindividuation as she fuses with her mother's movements and perspectives:
At some point Prairie understood that the person behind the camera most of the time really was her mother, and that if she kept her mind empty she could absorb, conditionally become, Frenesi, share her eyes, feel, when the frame shook with fatigue or fear or nausea, Frenesi's whole body there, as much as her mind choosing the frame, her will to go out there, load the roll, get the shot. Prairie floated, ghostly light of head, as if Frenesi were dead but in a special way, a minimum security arrangement, where limited visits, mediated by projector and screen, were possible (199).
<21> The pattern of this twentieth century dialectical matriarchal inheritance can be seen in the trajectory of Frenesi's mother, Sasha, who stayed true to her radical ideals but lacked any possible context in which to act on them. Sasha is defined in contrast to her mother and Frenesi's grandmother, Eula, who comes of age in a place and time where collectivity and romantic love can coincide. Eula is allowed an elision of the personal and the political as she encounters her future husband, Jess, at an IWW hall in Vineland. Her development toward self-awareness is not constructed as a product of the "individuated desire of the Freudian libido," but rather, as in Bloch's vision of anticipatory desire, tapping "a reservoir of social and political desire" (Weeks 190). Eula finds love as soon as she walks into the IWW hall, "and she found out not long after, the real Eula Becker too" (76). Upon "meeting herself," Eula finds that what she wants is, "-the road, his road, the bindlestiff life, his dangerous indenture to an idea, a dream of One big Union, what Joe Hill was calling the 'commonwealth of toil that is to be'" (76)
<22> This unity of politics and love is one of the novel's many temporary idylls, and is eventually thwarted by right wing backlash, as the couple is forced apart by state-backed arrest and violence which cripples Jess for life. Still, this idyll allows Eula to find herself as a fully politicized person, rather than limiting herself to the privatized roles of wife and mother: "She would remember the first time she was shot at, by Pinkertons in a camp up along the mad river, more clearly than the birth of her first child, who was Sasha" (76). This frank decentering of motherhood contrasts to Frenesi's experience of giving birth to Prairie, in which she feels confined and animal-like, completely absorbed by her biological role. Unlike this imprisonment, Eula's casual relationship to motherhood prevents the romance of family and nesting in Vineland from converging with individualist or patriarchal ideology. Eula, thus stands as a discursive outside to authoritarian constructions of family, labor, and patriarchy in a novel that concerns itself with the political desire for a feminist anti-work collectivity. As Kathi Weeks argues, the figure of the tramp, and especially the female tramp is:
situated against legible models of both productive masculinity and reproductive femininity. Given that the accumulation of property was supposed to be one of the central benefits of a disciplined life of wage labor, and respect for property a cornerstone of the sanctity of marriage, both male and female tramps violate yet another set of fundamental social values. Each is a potentially dangerous figure that could, unless successfully othered, call into question the supposed indisputable benefits of work or family and challenge the assumed naturalness of their appeal (166).
Eula stands for the return of this resistant figure, and the annual Becker-Traverse reunion in Vineland evokes a cyclical temporality that periodically returns to this Wobblie-oriented political vitality.
<23> Sasha's coming of age is marked by an era of politicization that is to be curtailed by World War II. When she first migrates to San Francisco in the thirties, it is a "rip-roaring union town, still riding the waves of euphoria from the General Strike of '34" (77). She throws herself into political activity and union organizing, and Pynchon shows his familiarity and passion for California radical history by having Sasha experience many central events:
She hung around with stevedores and winch drivers who'd been there to roll ball bearings under the hooves of the policemen's horses. By the time the war came along she'd worked in stores, offices, shipyards, airplants, and soon learned of the effort to organize farm workers in the valleys of California, known as the Inland March, and gone out there for a while to help, living on ditch banks with Mexican and Filipino immigrants and refugees from the dust bowl, standing midwatch guard against vigilante squads and hired goons from the Associated Farmers, getting herself shot at more than once (77).
However, Sasha's coming of age as a political agent is curtailed by the war and political compromises. Pynchon implies that the left capitulated to the need for a father figure in the form of FDR, a theme that is engaged throughout the novel as many of Sasha and Frenesi's compromises are the results of irresistible attractions to men in uniform. However, even these servile desires can be seen as a continuum of the novel's utopian impulse, as they take a negative stance in relation to sixties "repressive desublimation" in which Oedipal structures have been liquidated in favor of an impoverished sexual abundance (Marxism and Form 110).
<24> During the war Sasha's political development is stunted. While she triumphs as a sexual object, singing in the Tenderloin, reveling in that which was still untrammeled of the Barbary Coast, this does not fulfill her surplus desire for political solidarity, and she, like Frenesi, becomes a commodity shuffled around between men: "Turned out that as long as she kept her hair washed and stayed on pitch, she was just another instrument, and it could've been just about anybody, happened to be Sasha" (78). She attempts to fuse individual and social longing in coming together with her husband, who seems to be interested in her political development. However, in the retrospective stories Frenesi hears from her parents, her father admits "She thought I was some great political mind, and all's I was thinkin' was the usual sailor-on-liberty thoughts" (80). Like Frenesi, Sasha is both a scopic image and is involved with the production of images. Her career in the production of Hollywood films is darkened by the anticommunist terror of the McCarthy era, and she finds that Hollywood history is akin to the trajectory of the image:
'no more worthy of respect than the average movie script, and it comes about in the same way-soon as there's one version of a story, suddenly it's anybody's pigeon. Parties you never heard of get to come in and change it. Characters and deeds get shifted around, heartfelt language gets pounded flat when it isn't just removed forever' (81).
Although she did not "name names" and remained true to her leftist ideals, Sasha's life was caught up in a similar dialectic to that of Frenesi, in which the attempt to manufacture counter-hegemonic images is stifled and ridden with betrayal as the popular front era of Hollywood is inflicted with the "crisis in the institutions through which a real class politics had however
imperfectly been able to express itself" ("Periodizing" 181). And yet, the end of popular front communism also marks Sasha's liberation from a white male dominated concept of social class. She is thus "liberated" in the dialectical sense that Jameson attributes to the trajectory of emerging identity-oriented political formations: "in the charged and ambivalent sense which Marxism gives to that word (in the context of enclosure, for instance): they are separated from the older institutions and thus released to find new modes of personal and political expression" ("Periodizing" 182).
<25> Frenesi's coming of age marks a deepening of this image-driven impasse in the culture, as she is brought up in what Olster sees as a period where television serves as "the medium in which all old cinematic techniques now thrive," and where TV acts as a screen that both depicts and obscures killing in unjust colonial wars (125-126). As a teenager she lives in a suburban social wasteland, in the shadow of her mother's political disappointments and laments "That fascist fuck…owes me two years of work, you could've gone to college on what that SOB will always owe me…", and where TV penetrates the last remnants of nature:
Up and down that street, she remembered, television screens had flickered silent blue in the darkness. Strange loud birds, not of the neighborhood, were attracted, some content to perch in the palm trees, keeping silence and an eye out for the rats who lived in the fronds, others flying by close to windows, seeking an angle to sit and view the picture from. When the commercials came on, the birds, with voices otherworldly pure, would sing back at them, sometimes even when none were on (82).
<26> In retrospect, Frenesi is already doomed by the spectacle's penetration into all realms of life, but at the same time her identification with the image allows her to produce counterhegemonic discourse during the sixties' brief window of politicization. This twofold status of the image as synechdoche of a generalized paranoia and means to liberation is an affective constant in the novel, leading to a generative paranoia wrested from a masculinized realm, what Sianne Ngai refers to as "ugly feelings." Giving The X Files as an example, Ngai argues that paranoia has come to be seen as a masculine prerogative, with women taking on the role of rational empiricism. Implicitly, it is the female that is antitheoretical, then, as conspiracy theory becomes "a viable synecdoche for theory itself " (299). She notes that contemporary feminist experimental writing takes on the paranoid form as writers explore "their inability to escape the categories of oppression, linguistically or conceptually" (302). Here masculine paranoia is "reclaimed and reformulated for feminist inquiry as the highly specific problem of complicity" (302). Using the concept of "bad timing," Ngai points to the impasse of feminism and postmodernism, in which the creation of a language based on the feminine can only be complicit in maintaining the positive concepts of gender binaries. Frenesi's negative status allows a response to this impasse. Her position as a woman "between men" and with "bad timing" in relation to radical politics, allows for the recalibration of the idea of paranoia as a masculine prerogative and withholds an objective, empirical representation of feminism, refusing the "original sin" of making woman the custodian of morality, and rather offering a blank window that estranges received ideas (Strehle 115).
<27> The seriousness of Frenesi's narrative trajectory is countered by Zoyd Wheeler's comic mode, his ability to "Keep on Truckin'," and in this capacity he signals the persistence of sixties radical energies in the form of a resonant counterculture. In his combination of residual and emergent features, he evokes Pynchon's recuperation of the figure of the Luddite to signify the resistance to the "They-system." Against a cultural revanchism that disavows sixties time as primitive and unrealistic, Pynchon reframes the Luddite as a cultural hero or "baddass." His description of Ned Lud, the figure who gave rise to the term, could easily be applied to Zoyd, a figure of "dark fun" possessed by "comic shtick," contributing to the "long folk history of this figure, the Badass." Pynchon argues that violence against the machine, as in Ned Lud's destruction of knitting machines responsible for mass unemployment, was not a technophobic act. Rather, "it was open-eyed class war" ("Is it Okay" 40). For Pynchon, Gothic literature and science fiction, elements of which pervade Vineland, allow for this open eyed critique of technology, without necessarily leading to a technophobic world view. Zoyd's resemblance to such counterculture avatars of the Luddite as Robert Crumb's "Mr. Natural," evokes a formal homology between sf genre strategies of materialist counternarrative and the vernaculars of the counterculture underground comix and press.
<28> Zoyd's antics and the novel's comic resolution follows this sf Luddite logic, providing a rationale for what Michael Lowy calls "irrealistic" imagery, as a kind of realism directed against the ruthless ratiocinating logic of the machine, but not in itself irrational (211). The sf inflected narrative logic in Vineland that includes cases of invisibility, a "ninja death touch," zombie "Thanatoids" and Godzilla sightings adheres to Darko Suvin's notion of "cognitive fiction," a pedagogical, future-oriented form of defamiliarization (374). This realism does not require verisimilitude but rather "an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment" (375). This allows for a figuration of change grounded in materiality; the point of representation is not "static mirroring" of the environment, but rather "a creative approach tending toward dynamic transformation" (375). From this standpoint of materialist periodization follows a flexible understanding of realism, rather than the reification of realism as a "static object" (Beaumont 8). A realist representation involves an attention to contradiction that takes no definitive form, be it classical realism or modernist density.
<29> This "antinomy of realism," the impasse of transparency and opacity, is supplely dealt with in the depiction of Zoyd's yearly anti-work performance of "transfenestration." This act embodies the Luddite spirit, and points toward the dialectics of cultural refusal and recuperation in the novel, as windows are simultaneously closed and shattered. Every year Zoyd jumps through a window in order to prove he has a mental disability that merits a government stipend, an arrangement worked out with Brock Vond through Federal Agent Hector Zuniga as a form of control and surveillance (304). This absurd act is dialectical on a different axis than Frenesi's stark binary of faith and apostasy. Instead here we see Zoyd poised on the threshold of cultural resistance and media spectacle. As James Berger has argued, this act can be seen as a full absorption of Zoyd into Reaganite ideology, "designed to keep the memory of the 60s alive as a memory of insanity" ("Cultural Trauma"). However, throughout all of his humiliation Zoyd is depicted as a Luddite hero, able to detach from masculine norms and ridicule himself in order to support his daughter and his counterculture life style. Although the act is seemingly dangerous, he is depicted as a wily trickster protected from harm by a forcefield of counterculture accoutrements: marijuana smoke, bouncing checks, animals, kids and similarly clownish buddies.
<30> Zoyd embodies the fate of the counterculture detached from political power, a precarious mix of indulgence and liberation, clownery and irony, criminality and communalism, against the "mature" establishment, as Marcuse characterizes the effects of this powerlessness ("Counterrevolution" 50). Zoyd represents the cultural residue of the sixties in a moment of depoliticization, "where the radical opposition is isolated and outrageously weak while the enemy is almost everywhere and aggressively strong" ("Counter-revolution" 51). And yet, Zoyd's seemingly childish gestures may serve as a means of salvaging the past. In the context of the post-revolt period of the sixties, Marcuse argues:
Recollection thus is not remembrance of a Golden Past (which never existed), of childhood innocence, primitive man, et cetera. Recollection as epistemological faculty rather is synthesis, reassembling the bits and fragments which can be found in the distorted humanity and distorted nature (70).
These fragments and cultural residue of the sixties, Jameson argues, have a pedagogical purpose, allowing an aesthetic space where:
consciousness prepared itself for a chance in the world itself and at the same time learns to make demands on the real world which hastens that change: for the experience of the imaginary offers that total satisfaction of the personality and of being in the light of which the real world stands condemned, in the light of which the utopian idea, the revolutionary blueprint , may be conceived (Marxism and Form 90).
<31> In this framing, Zoyd's behavior operates in the mode of cognitive realism, impotent in the moment and yet lurching toward the novum: "guiding the practice of changing reality in accordance with its 'idea,' i.e., its own potentialities-- to make reality free for its truth" ("Counter-revolution" 70). Zoyd's unthreatening mien allows him to say what is elsewhere unspeakable. When Hector ridicules Zoyd for his allegiance to the sixties, indicating that he should achieve "some reconciliation with reality," Zoyd responds laconically and militantly: "When the State withers away, Hector" (28). In his quest to change up his yearly performance of insanity, he gets away with waving a chainsaw around "the Log Jam," a newly gentrified, new-age establishment. And although he does not accomplish anything at the Log Jam, he is also not punished for his threats, walking away as an ineffective yet comically unscathed trickster, finishing his beer before making his exit: "blowing broad show biz kisses and reminding everybody to watch the evening news" (8).
<32> Zoyd's comic estrangement from what Mark Fisher calls "capitalist realism," neoliberal capitalism's ambient and totalizing ideological hegemony, is achieved through a kind of bricolage, a remotivating of fragments and detritus left over from the sixties inflationary superstructure. Pynchon's understanding of realism and its relationship to this bricolage can be seen in his framing of the Watts rebellion in relation to the fragment, at once narrative and spatial. For Pynchon, Watts is a space that both determines and lies outside of postmodern Disneyfication, serving as a repository of radical memory, what Guy Debord, in his analysis of Watts, has called the unveiling of "unhabitual lucidity" ("The Decline"). Pynchon depicts the fragments and residue left over from the uprising, the "busted glass, busted crockery, nails, tin cans, all kinds of scrap and waste," which are compared to Watts Towers, as a source of creativity and representation against mass media spectacle. In the midst of mediated fragmentation and distortion, Watts serves as "a pocket of bitter reality." This space of the real is carefully delineated from "white fantasy," subject to redlining and confined to joblessness. The Watts subject is endowed with an ability to gauge totality by means of her relationship to political eventfulness and exclusion from capitalist spectacle. Thus, as Debord argues, Watts residents constitute the most advanced, rather than the most backward sector of history, "negation at work." The privileged epistemological status of Watts residents allow them to "resist the unreal." Pynchon equates the politicized refusal of the Watt's rebellion with an alternate understanding of aesthetics and politics. Thus he offers the expressive representation found at a Watts-based festivalas a model for a generative politicized aesthetic:
Along with theatrical and symphonic events, the festival also featured a roomful of sculptures fashioned entirely from found objects--found, symbolically enough, and in the Simon Rodia tradition, among the wreckage the rioting had left. Exploiting textures of charred wood, twisted metal, fused glass, many of the works were fine, honest rebirths ("A Journey").
<33> This understanding of a politicized bricolage is concretized in the depiction of rickety but functional hippie structures in Vineland. The counterculture's great Northerly migration from the city to the country marks a turn from politics as political revolution to counterculture tinkering, as seen by the advent of The Whole Earth Catalog, an underground journal which, at first, advocated a self-sustaining lifestyle and a Do It Yourself ethos still at work in countercultural anarchism today. This DIY ethos developed an internal dialectic, converging with a new entrepreneurial flexible capitalism and resisting it. As Simon Sadler argues, this libertarian turn was countered with another pole in the counterculture "dialectic of enlightenment" and its creation of vernacular structures (77). Against counterculture-influenced slick architecture, Sadler frames this amateur bricolage in a similar logic to Pynchon's Luddite imaginary. Counterculture shacks served as an attempt to restore:
a respect for nature, for spirit, for matter, for contingency, for a distinct objecthood beyond mere conceptualization. It wanted to grasp as Horkheimer and Adorno put it, existing things as such, not merely to note their abstract spatial temporal relationships, by which they can be seized, but on the contrary, to think of them as surface, as mediated conceptual moments which are only fulfilled by revealing their social, historical and human meaning (79).
In Vineland, the presence of jerry rigged counterculture structures denotes this kind of supple bricolage, a compromised but spirited form of representation. Zoyd's path is littered with "Luddite" structures and vehicles that reflect a counterculture epistemology and keep him precariously sheltered from authority. We first see this in Zoyd's Gordita beach shack which should be condemned, as it is corroded by salt and petrochemicals, and yet survives and protects him from Hector's pressure to snitch on drug dealers (22). Later, as Zoyd is eluding the authorities he draws on his counterculture friendships to borrow a vehicle. After a few false starts he is able to borrow a pickup which shouldn't work but somehow miraculously does: "'Long as you don't try it with the tank anywhere between empty and full'" (35). Zoyd's Vineland house is described as the product of years of diligent, if haphazard, scavenging, serving as a monument to bricolage reminiscent of Watt's Towers or what one countercultural builder called "the well scavenged house" (River 96):
Starting with a small used trailer shaped like a canned ham and a drilled well that he'd had to find a pump for, working by himself or with friends, using lumber found washed up on the beaches, scavenged off the docks, brought home from old barns he helped take down, Zoyd had kept adding on over the years, a room for Prairie, a kitchen, a bathroom, a tree house built among our redwoods that grew down the hill, set level with the loft in the house and connected to it by a rope bridge. A lot of it was nowhere near up to code, especially the plumbing, a sure cause of indigestion, running to many different sizes of pipe, including the prehistoric 5/8-inch and requiring transition fittings and adapter pieces that could take whole days at swap meets or even at the great Crescent City Dump to find (358).
This is described after Zoyd's house has been taken over by Brock Vond under RICO law and he can only look at it from a distance, "like a living thing he loved."
<34> This form of bricolage reframes realism as a form of détournement, a reuse of past materials to create new meaning. While critics such as David Porush see a firm division between eighties realities and sixties "transcendence" in the novel, this belies the materialist logic at the heart of the narrative (32). Porush sees Vineland as an exploration of sixties "magic," that which is "mythical, transcendent beyond epistemology and ontology, akin to the realm of narrative creation" (39). However, this doesn't take into account the logic of materialist periodization in which consciousness is not separable from the "the material activity and the material intercourse of men -- the language of real life" ("German Ideology" 42). It is this critique of the concept of transcendence that is at the heart of Jameson's notion of the sixties as "an inflationary moment of the superstructure." Here, sixties epistemology is inextricable from the material forces that subtend it; the sixties "had to happen" and no amount of pure will can voluntaristically overcome the current mode of production. The "[p]hantoms formed in the brains of men" are not transcendent, but sublimations "of their material life-process, which is empirically verifiable and bound to material premises." With this understanding:
<35> Morality, religion, metaphysics, all the rest of ideology and their corresponding forms of consciousness, thus no longer retain the semblance of independence…It is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness ("German Ideology" 42).
In this light, Vineland's mythical elements point not to transcendence but to negation and estrangement of common sense "realism" and thus concrete counterculture structures and vehicles are depicted more positively in the novel than are sixties transcendence and its legacy, New Age ideas. In Vineland, New Age thought is depicted as overly reliant on spirituality, self-realization and mind expansion. It thus represents the fantasy of pure ideas detached from any materialist grounding.
<36> David Armstrong describes the lineage from the politically grounded sixties underground press to New Age journals such as the East West Journal, which subscribed to new left health practices but promoted conservative views on family structures, birth control, abortion and union organization (280). This new age evacuation of politics marked a turn toward individualism, as in the remarks of "veteran of the Free Speech Movement and now an Aquarian commentator," Michael Rossman:
'If you alone are responsible for what happens to you then you aren't responsible for what happens to anyone else, because if they're responsible for their reality, and you're responsible for yours, then nothing you do basically can infringe in any fashion on their essential freedom' (Armstrong 280).
There was also an acquisitive capitalist strain of New Age thought, seen in a column by Robert Schwartz of New Age magazine, who dismisses the notion of business as "greedy and manipulative and overly competitive" with New Age tautologies:
In some cases, this is true, in other cases, not. I can only find one constant in all successful businesspeople. All successful businesspeople are businesslike, and that is very Zen (287).
Here, spiritual growth is seen to be compatible with greed, with the magazine New Age viewing financial acquisition as a spiritual practice and subscribing to a kind of neo-Calvinism (289). Stewart Brand, once editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue, went on to edit the technophilic Co-evolution Quarterly. Brand serves as another example of the impasses of counterculture as it detaches from political eventfulness, as his untethered utopianism leads him to express sympathy and openness to unambiguously right wing figures such as Milton Friedman (288).
<37> This critique of New Age ideology is thematized in Pynchon's sustained references to reabsorption of hippie "magic" into a mercenary New Age subculture, as the latest incarnation of Californian and American myth. As Elaine Safer argues:
Pynchon invites us to consider how the TV oriented culture of his twentieth century Vineland, with its interest in Zen, the marital arts and new age movements has replaced the dreams that helped found this nation's dreams of those who rushed for gold (46).
In this light, Pynchon makes clear that while the spiritual retreat run by the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives provides respite for some serious people, as a business it is laughable and mercenary. Pynchon depicts a "spirituality" totally eviscerated of gravitas as the spiritual retreat is concentrated on "cash flow" and is thus forced to "edge into the self-improvement business…" that advertises in such pop science magazines as Psychology Today (107). The emptiness of this New Age ideology becomes evident when Prairie arrives and takes on the role of cook. In the kitchen she finds herself surrounded by passive, confused people who don't know how to cope with the world, and who seem as anodyne and substanceless as the "24 hour 'New Age' music station, gushing into the environment billows of audio treacle" (109). In order to pay her way, Prairie takes on the job of a cook and finds herself working alongside Gerhard, a play on the name of Werner Erhard, founder of est (Erhard Seminars Training), a controversial cult-like self-help organization that offered "training" in the seventies and eighties.[3] In the kitchen, disorganization prevails as the New Age seekers bicker in the name of "self-criticism," a once political and now eviscerated Maoist process. Such sixties forms of self-organization and revolutionary pedagogy as "self-criticism," derived from Maoist attempts at cultural revolution, are now used as a childish form of whining and blame, "in which everybody got to trash the chef of the day personally for the failure of his or her menu, as well as plan more of the same for tomorrow" in the name of "total honesty"(110). In contrast to this commercialized fantasy of sudden enlightenment, the sisters who experience a degree of transcendence engage in a kind of spirituality which involves material labor, learning to become invisible with a "slow painstaking magic…using the millimeters and little tenths of a second, you understand scuffling and scraping for everything we get" (112).
<38> The sf or magic elements of Vineland are thus not only, or in the first place, a fantasy of creation as transcendence. Instead the view of sixties "magic" belies a materialist core in which:
Nostalgic commemoration of the glories of the 60s or abject public confession of the decade's many failures and missed opportunities are two errors which cannot be avoided by some middle path that threads its way in between ("Periodizing" 178).
As Jameson argues, the linear novel is in crisis in a homologous way to its "distant cousin" historical representation "and for much the same reasons" (180). And yet, like historiography, the novel is not to be abandoned. Instead, its procedures should be reorganized on a different level. Here, I have tried to adumbrate some of the countercultural and feminist experimental tools employed in a novel which, in the past, has alternately been classified as transparent or transcendent. Instead, the irrealism of Vineland points to a form of historical narrative that no longer attempts to produce "some vivid representation of history as it really happened," but rather to produce the concept history. Vineland's transfenestrational imaginary is a means to shatter positivistic historiography and reconstruct the concept of history itself from the shards.
* "Thanks to Hunter Bivens, Christopher Connery, Madeline Lane-McKinley, and anonymous readers for their helpful suggestions."
Notes
[1] Teresa de Lauretis describes this gendering as a structural constant in patriarchal society, in which narrative is guided by "the Name-of-the-Father" and male protagonists such as Oedipus pursue a quest through feminized landscapes populated by feminized ad static characters who act as "markers of positions-places and topoi - through which the hero and his story move to their destination to accomplish meaning" (109).
[2] Perhaps representing the preservation of utopian ideals and representational strategies in pop feminism, as implied by Stacey Olster (129).
[3] Evoking the Erhardt sponsored "hunger project" which envisioned ending world hunger simply by transforming consciousness and thinking positively,
an example of the truly depoliticizing ends of new age thought (Gordon).
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