By ERIC WAGNER
Special guest blogger
I love the martial arts material in this book. I first heard of ninjitsu in 1973 in the Manhunter stories in Detective Comics by Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson. I love the line on page 128 of Vineland, “DL reached the radical conclusion that her body belonged to herself.” Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea wrote about the question of people’s bodies belong to themselves or to the government or to their parents.
Born in 1962, I did not experience the 1960’s as an adult or even as an adolescent. I love how Pynchon writes about the Sixties. It resonates with my understanding of that period. I feel grateful that my family moved from Silver Spring, Maryland, to San Jose, California in November, 1967. I got to walk around San Francisco a lot in the next few years, watching hippies with little understanding on my part. The movie Zodiac really captures the look of the Bay Area in the late Sixties and early Seventies.
Here in 2025, I wonder about the role of marital arts and Pynchon in my life at the age of 63. I regret not learning more marital arts when I had the chance, but who knows what the future holds.
8 comments:
Great image. Man, I loved those Manhunter comics 52 years ago.
It’s important to differentiate between ninjutsu as a plot element and ninjutsu as a martial art. As a plot element it works very well. As a martial art it is suspect. There’s a perception among westerners that there’s some mystical power in the martial arts and nothing could be further from the truth. As a thirty plus years practitioner of the martial arts I can tell you that they involve a very high level of dedication and commitment, but all the garbage about the vibrating Palm and delayed death touch is garbage. They make for a good story, and that’s what Pynchon is looking for,, and it works very well within the context of the story, but when it comes to realism it flunks the test.
I respectfully disagree.
I share a similar temporal trajectory. My family moved from Cleveland to Palo Alto, California (not far from San Jose) in 1968. We lived there for a year before moving to Canada.
There seems quite a lot in this chapter that looks like a partial send-up of esoteric or New Age schools like Esalen. Like any satire, there seems a certain measure of truth to it. Pynchon connects his "lady asskickers" school to an older Christian (Jesuit) based school: "La Hermanas de Nuestra Senora de los Pepinares" - The Sisters of Our Lady of the Pepinares. Note that the word Hermanas contains the male/female blending theme: her + man. Pepinares appears either a made up word or a typo as that word doesn't exist in Spanish. Taking out the second and third letters, e + p, gives "Pinares" which translates to "Pines." On the next page, Pynchon describes the school as being set amongst trees. He lists some of the kinds of trees, but not pines.
The letters ep that Pynchon asserted recalls the Hebrew letter Pe which corresponds with all the war gods and thus connects with "lady asskickers." Christianity also appears later in this chapter
P. 109: Prairie finds herself "getting ESP messages," a characteristic of a genuine school, in my experience.
I will hopefully have more to say about this chapter if my health permits.
Van Scott, I also respectfully disagree with your opinion about the vibrating palm and delayed death touch as plot points. Vineland like all Pynchon's novels appears a blend of realism and surrealism without a clear delineation between the two. In that way, it shows similarities to Wilson's guerrilla ontology.
Eric, in your last paragraph, martial is both times spelled “marital.” Perhaps especially funny considering the location of a Sisterhood retreat.
“The secret to Spinach Casserole was the UBI, or Universal Binding Ingredient, cream of mushroom soup” (p. 111).
Spinach Casserole shows the occult ‘SC’, and brings to my mind the 60s rock band Ultimate Spinach, in my view one of the best band name ever, up there with Terminal Cheesecake. I believe they might have been thinking of a rather different type of ‘spinach’ though, perhaps the kind one can smoke…
Mushrooms do appear to bind ecosystems together through their mycelium, and perhaps if people would consume more of the psylocibin-containing ones, humanity would be less fractured as well.
Nowadays, UBI tends to more often mean Universal Basic Income, which is understood as ‘money’, but I wouldn’t mind a monthly Basic Income of “spinach” or mushrooms either…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0GKDq0oRDy8
“Tetas y Chetas M.C.” (p. 116)
I do not know if this means anything in Spanish, or Mexican slang, but the first thing that came to mind was Teth and Cheth, the Hebrew letters, in a similar way to Cheth and Tau which a few weeks ago I connected to “Chee-tos.” Teth corresponds to the tarot trump of Strength, which Crowley renamed Lust. Lon Milo DuQuette have this to say about it:
“The principal deities connected with this card are those who, by tradition, are associated with the power of the female to arouse, harness, and direct the animal nature.”
It concerns “the reabsorption of all evolving life and consciousness into Binah, the great supernal female.”
This seems to fit well with the idea of an all-female training group of Kunoichi Sisters, as well as the beginning of Prairie’s own hero’s journey (Cheth being the Chariot card, when the Knight, or Ninja, gets started on hir quest). The motorcycle club appear in a flashback rather than at the retreat, but since the scene concerns both DL and Frenesi I think my interpretation still makes sense.
Although at first disconcerting, I really like the way Pynchon suddenly and seamlessly goes in and out of flashbacks.
Pynchon uses the 'SC' semiotic quite a lot in Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon, not as much in Vineland. Though those letter combinations have appeared before, "Spinach Casserole" seems the first instance where it serves as a pun with an occult meaning starting on p. 110: "...Prime Directive, Prairie taught them Spinach Casserole." I've harped on this subject so much in the past 10 - 15 years that it could be said my Prime Directive involves teaching SC. The UBI gives a most transparent interpretation of SC = 68 though I would call it a shifting signifier with various different interpretations. A Universal Basic Income seems not too far removed as a Universal Binding Ingredient. UBI also suggests "you be I" which reminds me of the beginning of another Beatles' song, Lennon's "I Am a Walrus: which starts: "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together". That line serves as a bardo tag (indicator). Pynchon gets more into the bardos as the book proceeds starting with the next chapter, number 9.
Note that the SC relates to food, an important aspect of this code and of a Universal Binding Ingredient. Chapter 68 in The Book of Lies uses the title "Manna", food from heaven. Rabelais introduced the SC code in a story about a monastery kitchen which may have inspired Pynchon in this and in other ways. Rabelais and Pynchon share a fondness for low brow, satirical humor.
Spookah, a line in chapter 9 reminds me of the Lust card when DL mentions riding Takeshi like a beast in the midst of their manifested lust.
Sorry about the typos.
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