Am I making sense?

I began thinking about my presentation by asking myself what is political about Vineland. While the novel’s subject is obviously centred on American political issues, suppression of the counter culture in the 1960s right up to fascist-like social control in the 1980s, I asked myself what could be relevant for readers if we were not interested in specific historical events. Moreover, while the book’s protagonist appeared to be Zoyd from the first chapter, it is rather apparent that women dominated much of the narrative in the novel. Hence, I became interested to explore how a feminist reading of the text would be done and building on the quotation above, I decided to try to lead a discussion on how our class would interpret the novel from a feminist perspective.

Orwell (1946) posits that there are four reasons for writing – sheer egoism, aesthetic enthusiasm, historical impulse and political purpose. The latter two motivations come across strongly in Vineland. For historical impulse, Orwell states that writers possess a “desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them for the use of posterity” (5). Readers see one of Pynchon’s purposes in writing Vineland to be “rais[ing] some important "lost" questions, questions that have neither been asked nor answered by [American] politicians, or [American] cultural leaders: What happened during the sixties, and to the sixties? How did [America] get from the sixties to the nineties? What did we learn? What did we lose?” (Introduction – Thomas Pynchon and Us). Pynchon’s strong satirical criticism of the mass media’s influence (the Tube) stems from his desire to recoup America’s history and account for the ways things have been. In Vineland, “the perceptual is often bound in the political. The ubiquity and familiarity of TV is the source of its power to condition. In the most superficial way, television offers modes of behaviour upon which subjects can build their identity” (Boundary crossings: Vineland’s formal and ontological “flow”). Inevitably, by foregrounding this issue, it gives rise to a political purpose, “using the word ‘political’ in the widest possible sense [-] [desire] to push the world in certain direction, to alter other people’s idea of the kind of society that they should strive after” (Orwell 5) after an understanding of how things might have come into being. Hence, I wanted to explore the impact of the novel in changing or altering our ideas about feminism.

While I sought to answer the question of who the feminist reader is supposed to identify with in the novel thereby establishing Pynchon’s archetypal feminists or ideals of feminism, unfortunately, I think my presentation became one of a personal response to the novel’s portrayal of the female characters. The critical weakness of my presentation probably resulted from a lack of consideration for the novel’s larger literary form of a (post?)modernist text due to my own lack of understanding of what postmodernism is (or might be).

Zhiwen’s presentation on the novel’s postmodernist features and the subsequent class discussion was therefore a very helpful one in helping me to reframe my interpretation of the feminist issues in the text. Without getting into a debate over the term “postmodernism” and whether Vineland should be defined as a postmodernist text, my learning points from our discussion are based on the novel’s resistance to closure and the lack of a centre or unity. By the end of the novel, we are still unable to draw conclusions about the main female protagonists in the novel, namely, Frenesi Gates and Prairie. Our ideas of the female characters are constantly undermined by Pynchon’s ambiguous portrayal of them. We are unable to reconcile Frenesi’s involvement in the subversive counter-culture movement, 24fps, with her eventual betrayal of the movement due to her sexual desire for Brock Vond. Similarly, we are also ambivalent about Prairie’s desire for Brock Vond to “come back … [and] take [her] anyplace [he] want[s]” (384).

If, however, we were to recognise the novel’s resistance to closure and appreciate that Pynchon’s characters “exemplify, as well as … mock what it exemplifies, the complicated identify-formation/fabrication process in a thoroughly capricious postmodern climate” (Ravichandran 18), then we begin to be cognisant that we need to read Pynchon’s characters differently and are not meant to identify with them per se. If we agree with Ravichandran that in the postmodern age, the “old “either-or” breaks down and the new “both/and-also multiplicity and difference opens up new possibilities” (14), then the critical question for us to ask is not which female character could a feminist reader identify with in the novel, but rather the political implications of Pynchon’s characterisation of Frenesi and Prairie in opening up the space for a discussion of feminist issues and concerns such as whether we should deny or acknowledge women’s inexplicable attraction to power and authority (be it socially-conditioned or inherent in women’s psyche) as Frenesi and Prairie epitomises in their relationship with Vond.

In conclusion, I would like to respond to the question on whether political literature fails in it being too topical. From a reader’s point of view, I posit that the difficulty with political literature is with the context of its creation. By context, I do not mean the time and space in which the text is constructed which could possibly translate into the text’s subject matter and risk becoming too topical. Rather, I think any reading of political literature requires a situation of the text in the contemporary literary movement so that an appreciation of the aesthetics would compliment an appreciation of the political motivation. This is where I begin to recognise the value of Orwell pluralising the motives of writing and understand that all the motives is brought to bear on a piece of literary work.