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By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
Early in this chapter I had a sense of the special quality of Pynchon’s writing. I can’t put my finger on what makes his writing so magical. I will see if I can articulate it over the next few months.
When I first read this book in 1990, I found it utterly resonated with my politics. Born in 1962, I had lived through the Nixon and Reagan years, and I found myself saying “YES!” to how Pynchon characterized those eras in this novel. Reading this chapter again in 2025, I found that the politics still resonate for me. Perhaps his new novel Shadow Ticket, due out October 7 of this year, will help me make sense of our current political situation and of how we got here. I know Shadow Ticket deals with the 1930’s, Wisconsin, jazz, and Hungary, etc. I have listened to a bunch of Count Basie getting ready to read the new Pynchon.
Since 1990 I have gotten every new Pynchon novel right when it came out, and the internet has provided prepublication glimpses of each of these novels. Of course, the novels themselves have always defied my expectations.
Frenesi at the end of this chapter always makes me think of the Gang of Four song “I Love a Man in a Uniform.”
I recommend checking out Michael Johnson blog post “Pynchon, Wilson, and TV: Irony, Etc.” at https://substack.com/home/post/p-169809446
8 comments:
Looking forward to reading Shadow Ticket, very exciting!
When reading Vineland all the way through a couple of months ago I received a hardcover of Chapel Perilous Prop sent me which included a few "Hail Eris!" stickers. It made me consider that perhaps Frenesi represents one form of Eris?
Frenesi digging guys in uniforms continues the theme of blending male and female.
George Vandeveer (p. 75) was a famous Union lawyer.
I found this quite interesting, (p. 81): "Frenesi had absorbed politics all through her childhood, but later, seeing older movies on the Tube with her parents, making for the first time a connection between far-off images and her real life ..."
Eric, I have been trying to figure out why this Pynchon novel in particular is your favorite. Is it all of the California stuff? A lot of the jokes seem to be about the California counterculture.
Had a convo about Vineland with a friend who is a Pynchon fan, that might be worth rehashing here.
I didn't really get why there seemed to be an air of disappointment surrounding the book, with less than enthusiastic responses from people like Timothy Leary and David Foster Wallace, but I missed that Vineland had been the first new Pynchon novel in almost 20 years, and was following up from Gravity's Rainbow.
That's a lot of hype to live up to! And when the book turns out to be kinda breezy and silly and fun, playing with low culture as high culture, etc, it makes sense that people who wanted another imposing magnum opus would be thrown for a loop.
Though then looking at TP's bibliography, it occurred to me that he probably works on multiple projects simultaneously. Obviously I could be wrong, and maybe some folks know definitively one way or the other, but the idea that it took him 17 years to write 385 pages, and then 7 years to wrote 773 pages, and then 9 years to write 1,085 pages doesn't really jive.
It makes more sense that Vineland was a side project, a pallet cleanser, while working on Mason & Dixon.
I was glad to find an appearance from "Mad River" on p. 76, after noticing it being in the Vineland geographical surroundings a few weeks ago.
"Eddie Enrico and his Honk Kong Hotshots" makes me think that there are quite a few hot shots in this book...
Sasha becoming one of the Hotshots by singing "in G" at the "Full Moon Club" strongly suggest to me a correlation with the High Priestess of the tarot.
The Pynchon wiki confirmed my suspicion that "the news from Mars" (p. 78) was a reference to Orson Welles' infamous radio rendition of War of the Worlds.
"The rays coming out of the TV screen would act as a broom to sweep the room clear of all spirits." (p. 83)
I never thought of it this way, but watching something does have a soothing effect on me, although I handpick my films and do not watch any actual TV channel. Perhaps just as importantly, I use a projector, so no light rays are coming straight into my eyes.
I watch a literal projection in the material world of something (a film) that, in being directed, itself became a projection of someone's ideas.
The analog process of light going through celluloid and being then projected onto a screen has deep philosophical implications (think for instance of Plato's cave).
In contrast, the Tube loses all this metaphysical depth, at the time of Vineland's writing it was still cropping movies due to its shape and, because of its beaming "Tubelight", is much more likely to tire the eyes and hypnotize the mind.
Tom Jackson asked, “[W] hy this Pynchon novel in particular is your favorite?” When this book first appeared in 1990, I had spent eight years obsessively learning from Robert Anton Wilson and his books. That led me to somewhat obsessively learn from Tim Leary and his books. Gravity’s Rainbow played a unique role in Tim’s life, as he recounted a number of times. Tim read it quickly while in solitary confinement, and he discussed Gravity’s Rainbow in just about every book he wrote for the rest of his life.
I had struggled to read Gravity’s Rainbow, and I anticipated struggling to read Pynchon’s new novel Vineland. When instead I read Vineland quickly and with great enjoyment and understanding, it had a profound effect on me. I lived in Arizona in 1990, but I had lived in California from 1967 to 1978, and during the eighties I thoroughly absorbed Leary and Wilson’s ideas about the westward drift of civilization, so Vineland’s California setting might have played a role in my enthusiasm for the novel. Plus, the politics in the novel really resonated for me. Pynchon articulates the idea of the Nixon counter-revolution shutting down the new ideas of the 1960’s as well as the ominousness of the Reagan years. In addition, I found and continued to find Vineland so much fun. I loved the humor and the martial art and the winks at the Pynchon rumor mill of the 80’s.
In 2006 or 2007 I used Vineland for a community college English class. Trying to teach it helped me appreciate the complexity of the novel’s flashback beneath its breezy surface.
Bobby CAmpbell: TP definitely did work on multiple projects. He had Mason & Dixon going while he was writing Vineland.
Eric Wagner may have already written about this, but RAW told Eric he thought the relative breeziness of Vineland was because Pynchon had an urgent point and he wanted it to get through to as many as possible. Or at least that's me remembering what Eric told me that RAW told him a long time ago, so caveat: the Telephone Game.
Bobby, in a comment I made before this group started I mentioned that Pynchon started working on Mason & Dixon after completing Gravity's Rainbow then took a break at some point to pen Vineland. This repeated an earlier pattern. He began work on GR after finishing V, but took a break to write The Crying of Lot 49 which he became less than satisfied with.
Michael, thank-you for the valuable info of what RAW said to Eric about Vineland. The urgent point he wanted to get through to as many as possible would explain the extremely blatant qabalistic references. For instance, at the start of this chapter, #6, we find childishly obvious references to Tiphareth: "Home between shifts..."; home is where the heart is. Tiphareth represents the seat of the True Self (home). We often get distracted from or out of sync with this genuine self hence the "shifts." In the same sentence, Pynchon locates her in a "Sun Belt city" - an unambiguous allusion to the solar nature of Tiphareth. Sun Belt = S+B = 62 = Healing.
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