SOURCE: "Love and Death in and Around Vineland, U.S.A.," in Boundary 2, Vol. 18, No. 2, Summer, 1991, pp. 166-80.

[In the following essay, Wilde examines the major themes, narrative presentation, and parody in Vineland. Citing the problem of indeterminacy and equivocation in the novel, Wilde contends that "Vineland seems from time to time to become what it beholds; a busy, pop version of America more attentive to momentary surfaces than to depth."]

Presided over by "the hacker we call God," populated by characters who are "beneath [His] notice," who are in fact only so many "digits in God's computer," Vineland returns Pynchon's readers to threatening but familiar ground. We are back, it seems, in the world of Oedipa Maas, with its "zeroes and ones twinned above, hanging like balanced mobiles right and left, ahead, thick, maybe endless." Actually, all of Pynchon's novels stipulate opposition as their basic formal principle, but in V. and Gravity's Rainbow, one term (Street, Zone) is effectively privileged over the other (Hothouse, System). What sets The Crying of Lot 49 apart is the absoluteness of the balance, and the fact that its contrasting terms are linked, as Oedipa despairingly thinks, in "a symmetry of choices." Predicated on the same sort of opposition, Vineland descends (in this respect at least) from Lot 49, as its California does from the earlier book's "legacy America." There, in and around Vineland, Brock Vond, agent of the Justice Department in both the Nixon and Reagan administrations, and Frenesi Gates, the novel's tarnished, unholy grail, who is variously his lover, informer, prisoner, and prey, act out the roles of zero and one—complementary images, as it turns out, of what is wrong with the country whose destiny their lives chart from the 1960s to 1984.

Brock is, among other things, the emblem of Gravity's Rainbow's "masculine technologies," as well as of the treacherous System "They" represent in Vineland: "the State law-enforcement apparatus, which was calling itself 'America.'" Even more insidiously, he suggests the murderous embrace of sameness and stasis that is summed up most succinctly in his devotion to "the Lombrosian concept of 'misoneism' … this deep organic human principle, which Lombroso had named after the Greek for 'hatred of anything new.'" With his own grandly proportioned and ubiquitous hatred, Brock becomes the most vivid marker of the death or deathliness that leaks into every corner of Vineland's volatile, hectic landscape. It is hardly accidental that he reminds Frenesi's ex-husband, Zoyd Wheeler, "of self-destructive maniacs he'd ridden with back in his clubcar days … dreaming away with these romantic death fantasies, which usually gave them hardons they then joked about all night."

The conjunction of death and sex provides the necessary clue to the deeper and more contested levels of Vond's personality, where the stability he cherishes proves to be a necessary, but barely tenable, lie, so that while "everywhere Brock looked he saw some defects of control … others, in their turn, were not so sure about Brock." And with good reason, since under his carefully composed exterior there lurks "his uneasy anima," the "watchful, never quite trustworthy companion personality, feminine, under-developed," who visits him "in a number of guises, notably as the Madwoman in the Attic." That the Madwoman speaks to something in Brock at once feared and desired is obvious. The suggestion, echoed and amplified by an inner voice "whispering Kick loose," is of subterranean, inchoate impulses that lie below or above the level at which he deliberately chooses (or, alternatively, is compelled, self-protectively) to live. But to say that what most obsesses Vond—himself, women, sexuality—is also what he is most afraid of; or to note that his radically insecure ego marks the precise, vulnerable source of his overly valued sense of control is only to ripple the psychological and ontological surface of his being. Closer to the mark is the recognition that if his deepest desire is to be more (or less) than human, his greatest and attendant fear is of the human body—that uncertain, destructible vessel of human incarnation, messy, uncontrollable, and unavoidably committed to death. This may well explain why, at the point that Brock learns about Frenesi's daughter, Prairie, "something else, something from his nightmares of forced procreation, must have taken over." "Each birth … would be only another death for him," we're told later on, and so he begins the demented pursuit of the girl that leads in time to the prophetic fulfillment of his terror, which links the body's sexual activity (could Prairie be his daughter?) with its destruction.

In terms of these various equations, the connection between Frenesi and Vond becomes clear when, after the angry, defeated rejection of her baby, Frenesi imagines (at least she appears to be imagining) that Brock is with her: "With his own private horrors further unfolded into an ideology of the mortal and uncontinued self, Brock came to visit, and strangely to comfort…. Whispering, 'This is just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying in the dirt, blank-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells.'" As the passage ends, with Frenesi picturing herself as "only an animal with a full set of pain receptors after all," the last piece of the puzzle falls into place, and the ultimate horror of Pynchon's world reveals itself. No reader of Gravity's Rainbow needs to be reminded of that novel's obsessive concern with bodily functions, its dialectic of fascination and repulsion, its establishing of the body as the site of both mortality and its transcendence. What Vineland adds (can add, perhaps, because Pynchon seems less personally implicated now in the disgust he attributes to his characters) is not only the perception that the human, reduced to mere body, becomes animal but the awareness that Frenesi, "surrendered" in this phantasm of degradation, is less Brock's victim than his mirror—control and surrender being, as Eliot and other modernists recognized in their time, intimate and indivisible in their dynamics.

Frenesi's preferred mode of coping with the terrors of time and mortality appears nonetheless to be very different from what is imaged here. More characteristic is her dream "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" (my emphasis). Sounding like something out of an Auden-lsherwood play, the passage recalls more generally modernism's wistful, obsessive longing for transcendent unity; and it is no accident that Frenesi, whose thoughts are haunted by the specter of time, dwells repeatedly on the transhuman, transhistorical, ultimately spatial moments that define the modernist imagination. Nothing I've just said, however, is meant to set Frenesi psychologically or ideologically apart from Brock. Nor is the issue simply that her sexual enthrallment allows her to live not according to "the time the world observed but [in] game time, underground time, time that could take her nowhere outside its own tight and falsely deathless perimeter." If Frenesi's desire is "to ignore history and the dead, to imagine no future," if she grieves over having been "brought back to the world like silver recalled grain by grain from the Invisible to form images of what then went on to grow old, go away, get broken or contaminated," Brock, man of the world though he is, longs no less for "a world of simplicity and certainty." And he participates no more than she in the ragged contingency of history and time. Embodying the ahistorical and the narrowly historical, hungering for timeless moments or for logical causality, figuring, as I've already noted, surrender and control, Frenesi and Brock, devotees respectively of camera and gun, are the obverse and reverse of the same coin. It hardly needs saying that if, in Frenesi's "world based on the one and zero of life and death. Minimal, beautiful. The patterns of lives and deaths," Brock is patently the Zero of death, her own minimal One has little more to do with life and living. Certainly, much in Vineland suggests that men are the villains of all psychic and political wars, but in the novel's moral economy, Frenesi comes across as no better than Brock—only, unfortunately for her, as less calculating and powerful.

.…

If I have dwelt at such length on Frenesi and Brock, it is because they, more than any of the other characters, intimate the novel's moral position: roughly, an existential imperative to accept the undeniability of time and the imperfection of "the spilled, the broken world." Vineland, in short, prods the self to move toward exactly what Frenesi dreads—"another stage … further into adulthood perilous and real, into the secret that life is soldiering, that soldiering includes death." Although some critics find an unbridgeable gap between Pynchon's postmodernism and his ethical concerns, he is, in fact, not only a moralist but an insistent, urgent, and sometimes (most notably in V.) a heavy-handed one. That being the case, it seems plausible to ask whether Vineland's moral dimension defines itself only in opposition to Brock's and Frenesi's evasions of life's dense complexities—that is, negatively and obliquely—or whether, as in the other novels, there is an exploration of some middle ground between the postulated extremes.

At this point, which is to say, in most of the book, matters quickly become more problematical. In their different ways, all three of Pynchon's earlier novels engage the question of middles, though in V. and Gravity's Rainbow (where they are specified most directly in McClintic Sphere's "keep cool, but care" and as Roger Mexico's "probabilities") they remain largely notional, subverted as they are by the novels' subtextual fascination with extremity. Only in Lot 49 is there, in the notion of diversity and in Oedipa's intent, active pursuit of it, a genuine formal and ideological realization, or at least intimation, of the desired middle ground. The question is whether in this respect, too, Vineland, in its own thematic explorations and structural enactments, harkens back to the earlier book. Ironically, but significantly, the closest approach to a middle in Vineland comes by way of parody. Commenting, presumably, on Frenesi's polarized "one and zero of life and death" and on Brock's veneer of linearity and logic, Pynchon introduces into his novel the bizarre, ontologically ambiguous Thanatoids, who, like Barthelme's Dead Father, are "dead but still with us, still with us, but dead." Reminiscent in some ways of Gravity's Rainbow's "moderate little men," who are held, always, "at the edges of revelations," the Thanatoids are kept back, not from illumination but from death, and not by fear but by feelings of resentment and desires for revenge. Beyond that, one can only speculate on what exact role these mysterious characters are meant to play in the novel, though it seems safe enough to see in their "karmic imbalances" a clue to the nature of the larger American population, traumatized by television and possibly by memories of the sixties—"not living but persisting, on the skimpiest of hopes."

Is there any larger hope in Vineland as a whole? Between the deathliness of Brock Vond and the death-in-life of the Thanatoids, between Frenesi's surrender and Brock's control (or in opposition to them all), does there emerge some time or place that embodies Pynchon's repeated pursuit of what is at best an always elusive goal? Not unexpectedly, given the genealogy of Pynchon's fiction, it is the sixties that offer themselves as the most plausible candidate, and the novel does indeed present from time to time an idea or ideal form of the decade that readers of a certain age will find familiar. So we hear about "the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television" and about "a world sprung new, not even defined yet, worth the loss of nearly everything in this one." Most of all, we come upon this typically plangent, resonant contrast: "Outside spread the lampless wastes, the unseen paybacks, the heartless power of the scabland garrison state the green free America of their childhoods even then was turning into." Echoing Oedipa's plaintive "how had it ever happened here, with the chances once so good for diversity?," the description differs in subtle but important ways. Whereas Oedipa's alternative America is placed firmly in the past (or in the parallel world of the Tristero), Vineland's other, greener, freer America is alive enough around 1969 to be under siege and dying. The effect of the shift is telling. By locating the ideal in the lifetime of his characters, Pynchon betrays again his nostalgia for the regretted time before the eclipse of "the analog arts … by digital technology."

Still, however impassioned these occasional tributes are, there is another, darker side to Pynchon's portrait of the age, with its betrayals, shallowness, irresponsibility, and fears, its obsessive avoidance of death, and the desire, shrewdly recognized by Brock, for order, "the deep … need only to stay children forever…. Children longing for discipline." Summed up in his comments about the debasement of the decade's talismanic word love—"its trivializing in those days already well begun, its magic fading, the subject of all that rock and roll, the simple resource we once thought would save us"—Pynchon's indictments go even further. As we learn, for example, about Frenesi's collusion with Brock in the murder of the now-Thanatoid Weed Atman, it becomes increasingly difficult to overlook the fact that Pynchon's attitude is not only critical but acerbic: a reflex, quite possibly, of a more intimate, local, personal sense of betrayal—the betrayal of the variously rendered ideal of simplicity and wholeness his fiction constantly returns to and that Vineland intermittently locates in the decade of light and love. More is at stake, however, than complex reactions to a complex period. In problematizing all of the decade's longings, Pynchon simultaneously problematizes his own. The results are most apparent in a curious, tonally enigmatic scene between Zoyd and Mucho Maas (a record producer now, divorced from Oedipa) as they reminisce about the good old drug days and the knowledge those days brought that "you were never going to die." For the reader at least, the conclusion is unavoidable: Mucho's "beautiful certainty," the acid-induced dream of immortality, is only a replay of Frenesi's desire for timeless moments. The narrator's perspective, sympathetic and distanced by turn, is harder to pin down: "It was the way people used to talk," he says about Mucho's and Zoyd's wistful memories and then goes on shortly to invoke his own romantically "green free America." Less evenhanded than discordant, these sinuous twists and turns hint at just how indeterminate Pynchon's rendering of the sixties is throughout the novel.

.…

Pynchon's treatment of the decade implies, in turn, a more fundamental, at any rate a more widespread, equivocation emblematic of Vineland as a whole. Most notably, the novel vacillates between what I earlier called its existential morality and the Romantic primitivism that it inherits from Gravity's Rainbow. Rather more spotty and attenuated than in that book, Vineland's primitivist leanings are nevertheless unmistakable. They announce themselves, as usual, in Pynchon's familiar vocabulary of the mysterious and the invisible, with its references to "another deep nudge from forces unseen," "hidden structures," "signs and symptoms," "the realm behind the immediate," "another order of things," "a world behind the world she had known all along," "some invisible boundary," and so forth. As so often in Pynchon's fiction, the common thread is loss: the sense of some innocence, wholeness, and unity overcome, as in the story of the woge, not by this or that human action but simply by the fact of human presence. That the woge, having withdrawn "before the influx" of humanity, might "if we started fucking up too bad … come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us," highlights primitivism's usual contrast of now and then, here and elsewhere, which is the burden too of Sister Rochelle's pivotal, quietist parable of being:

"It takes place [she begins] in the Garden of Eden. Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam—it was the Serpent…. It was sleazy, slippery man." Rochelle continued, "who invented 'good' and 'evil,' where before women had been content to just be…. [M]en also convinced us that we were the natural administrators of this thing 'morality' they'd just invented. They dragged us all down into this wreck they'd made of the Creation, all subdivided and labeled."

"'Don't commit original sin,'" she ends, "'Try and let her just be.'" Who "her" is needn't concern us now. What is striking about the parable's feminist message is its echo of the description, already quoted, of "the Mellow Sixties … not yet so cut into pieces" and, still more, of Gravity's Rainbow's indictment of "human consciousness, that poor cripple, that deformed and doomed thing … [whose] mission [it is] to promote death."

Vineland's accusation, if less vehement and fervent, is no less to the point, and as in the earlier book, it reveals Pynchon's habit of locating his ideal time or place, the realm of being, somewhere before or outside the world that consciousness perversely segments and destroys. But for all its manic energy, Vineland is more hectic than persuasive—which may be why one is prompted to ask of it, more than of his other fiction, what exactly the referent of its Edenic vision is. The novel's title points toward "Vineland the Good": both Leif Ericson's pre-Columbian discovery and, almost a millennium later, "'A Harbor of Refuge,' as the 1851 survey map called it." But Ericson's eastward-lying America is only an unearned suggestion hovering weightlessly above the novel's action, and Pynchon's renamed Eureka, though buttressed by stories of the woge and the Yuroks and by intimations of preternatural light, a "call to attend to territories of the spirit," is hardly more substantial. Brad Leithauser's remark that "there is little 'behind' all the clatter in Vineland, nothing transcendentally spiritual or beautiful or numinous—or even overarchingly malignant" seems to me exactly right. It may well be the absence of some glamorously threatening force—something on the order of V., Blicero, or the inscrutable Tristero—that accounts for the absence of a persuasive, compelling Counterforce. Brock Vond, the most likely candidate, hardly measures up to this standard; and it is, in any event, arguably the case that the major villain of Vineland is not even intended to be the death-dealing Brock but "television, which … had trivialized the big D itself."

Certainly, much of the novel's satire centers on America's response to what is generally called the Tube. Not surprisingly, the Thanatoids "watch a lot of Tube," but so do most of the book's characters, their fate ironically inscribed in the story of Zoyd's longtime pursuer, Hector Zuniga, the DEA agent who has become a "tubal freak" and who throughout the novel is in flight from the Tubaldetox Squad. Furthermore, according to Prairie's young friend, Isaiah Two Four, Zoyd and his hippie generation are no better: "You believed in your Revolution … 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." That Pynchon's analysis is neither new nor probing matters less than the fact that it is itself to no small degree trivialized by the novel's immersion in the culture it holds responsible for the failure of the sixties ideal. Filled not only with actual television trivia but with easy, one-liner references to imaginary TV shows—"John Ritter in The Bryant Gumbel Story," "Woody Allen in Young Kissinger," "Pat Sajak in The Frank Gorshin Story," and so on—Vineland seems from time to time to become what it beholds: a busy, pop version of America more attentive to momentary surfaces than to depth. It follows that Pynchon's insistent suggestions of mysterious and possibly redemptive dimensions beyond the two-dimensional tubal world lack sufficient contextual support. Whatever their local and occasional energy, these references appear unintegrated; and the possibility of "that whole alternative America" sinks under the insubstantial weight of TV culture. As it does so, the novel's balance shifts still further away from whatever its primitivist references are meant to express—away, among other things, from Sister Rochelle's way of being and toward the more arduous path of becoming. The failure of the mythic in Vineland requires a pursuit of Pynchon's moral intentions not in some hypothetical "elsewhere" but in the concrete, death-tormented world his characters inhabit.

.…

What remains, with the compromised sixties and the epiphenomenal Vineland out of the way, is the novel's final chapter, where against the abundant manifestations of Thanatos (presided over, as usual, by the omnipresent arch-individualist, Brock Vond) are massed the congregated forces of Eros: home, family, union, reunion, and love—including Zoyd's love for Prairie, which, as a more concrete revelation of Vineland's "goodness," bestows on him "his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth." But since endings are structural as well as thematic, I want to pause first over Pynchon's narrative strategies. What they reveal again, now in a more formal way, are the underlying tensions that have by now become characteristic and familiar. No reader of Vineland has to be told just how dense, difficult, sinuous, and excessive the novel's plot is or how attentive one needs to be to its abrupt swerves and backtrackings, its embedded stories and endless, erratic flashbacks, its modal mimicry of any and all cultural forms, high and low, from comic strip to parable. Nevertheless, as the fluid, associative, non-linear interfaces of some computers mask the tight, digital logic of what transpires beneath their user-friendly graphics, so Pynchon's narratives, calculated though they are to undermine the symmetries of Frenesi's or Oedipa's ones and zeros, conceal their own structural economies. That Vineland, unlike the other novels, then proceeds to undo these economies is another matter, one I will come to shortly. For the moment, what is significant is that, beginning with the latest of the annual Traverse-Becker reunions (the gathering in Vineland of Frenesi's and Prairie's many and varied relatives), everything in the book seems, in apparent defiance of its narrative movement up to this point, to move toward resolution and reconciliation.

This movement explains, I suspect, why several reviewers have discovered various signals of counterentropic hope: "some faint possibility of redemption, some fleeting hints of happiness and grace"; "faint signs of optimism"; or "some small possibility of faith-keeping and love inside a family." The invariable qualifications and hesitations are telling, but they don't, I think, go far enough. As Pynchon assembles or reassembles all of his major characters and not a few of the minor ones in this chapter, it is hard to resist the feeling that we are reading, incongruously, some odd, revisionist text modeled on, say, Howards End or To the Lighthouse—or even that we are watching some peculiar, postmodern variation on the finale of a Hollywood musical comedy. On the other hand, something unifying does emanate from the occasionally grotesque vitality of the gargantuan Becker-Traverse get-together. Conceivably, one might even argue that a ritual as sacramental as Howards End's hay-cutting inheres in the Rabelaisian scene of community eating: "It was the heart of this gathering meant to honor the bond between Eula Becker and Jess Traverse, that lay beneath, defined, and made sense of them all."

But the most plausible token of small, faint possibilities (though it is not the one the reviewers I've quoted from have in mind), actualizes itself in the story of two characters so far unmentioned: DL Chastain, Frenesi's one-time friend, and Takeshi Fumimota. For reasons too complicated to spell out here, the two come together under the sign of death when DL mistakenly inflicts on Takeshi the Vibrating Palm (also known as the Ninja Death Touch), which is intended for Brock Vond. When, thereafter, both come to the Kunoichi Retreat (DL in flight from what she has done, Fumimota in pursuit of her), Sister Rochelle, just before she recounts her parable of being to Takeshi, scathingly orders DL "to become this fool's devoted little, or in your case big, sidekick and to try and balance your karmic account by working off the great wrong you have done him." Partners now, the two go appropriately into the "karmic adjustment business," with the Thanatoids as their anxious clients; and what signifies is that, for all their limitations, which Sister Rochelle is always more than ready to point out, they are in their own way involved, responsible, and concerned for others. This, and the fact that the trajectory of their lives moves them from death inflicted and received to life restored, even transformed into something like love. So, DL, who has, for better or worse, inherited her teacher's "entanglement in the world" and is clearly intended as Frenesi's foil, becomes the conduit through whom Prairie learns about her mother; Takeshi initiates their dealings with the Thanatoids, one of whom, ironically, but more wisely than he knows, compares his attempt to recover from the Vibrating Palm to TV shows "where, you got love, is always winnin' out, over death"; and in the chapter that was my starting point, the two, still fallible and uncertain but among the novel's most attractive characters, renegotiate the "no-sex clause" of their agreement and get on, in Sister Rochelle's words, with "the usual journey from point A to point B"—an accomplishment, in the context of Vineland, of no small magnitude.

But if, for now, Eros, in the form of both family unity and DL's and Takeshi's commitment to each other, appears to have overcome Thanatos and its individual discontents, still, as Jess recites to his assembled relatives a passage from Emerson that promises "secret retributions [which] are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice," it is all but impossible to resist the feeling that, for whatever reason, Pynchon is overplaying his hand. Against Jess Traverse's comforting Emersonian gospel one needs to set Zoyd's lawyer's pithier, more contemporary estimate of the universe's workings, summed up in the phrase "life is Vegas" or the narrator's own description of "a sunset that was the closest we get to seeing God's own jaundiced and bloodshot eyeball, looking back at us without much enthusiasm." Besides, there are particular incidents and attitudes that contravene the possibilities of unity: Zoyd's failure to recover his house, "his own small piece of Vineland" from Brock's men; the fact that Frenesi, her daughter, and her mother, all three brought together now, are at best "perilously reconnecting" (my emphasis); or that Weed Atman, who has "lately … just been letting [Frenesi] be," still remains "a cell of memory, of refusal to forgive." In short, like the "long, desolate howling" of the Thanatoids that follows hard upon a morning when, "often for the first time, [they] sought contact with the eyes of other Thanatoids," hope, as often as not, peters out, the victim of its own longing imagination. Kin to the novel's thematic open-endedness and its wild, associative discursiveness, these scattered loose ends are obviously subordinate to, or in a tensive relationship with, its gesture of formal closure. Nevertheless, despite my invocation of Forster and Woolf, Vineland is no modernist novel (as the contrast of the formal and the thematic might suggest), and I've deliberately used the word "gesture" to suggest, additionally, how unresolved, even on a structural level, the novel's ending proves to be.

Consider the bizarre events that bring the book to its close. They begin with the attempted, perhaps incestuous kidnapping of Prairie by Brock, an airborne Hades come for his Persephone, and then move on, in a reversal of the usual deus ex machina, to the foiling of the attempt, as he is hoisted back into his helicopter (thus his colleagues' name for him: "Death From Slightly Above") thanks to the suspension of REX 84, "Reagan's so-called readiness exercise"). Next comes the convenient elimination of Vond by "the legally ambiguous tow-truck team of Eusebio ('Vato') Gomez and Cleveland ('Blood') Bonnifoy," turned for the occasion into antic psychopomps who lead a puzzled Brock to "the land of death." And, finally, there is the scene that ends Vineland, in which Prairie, after a hectic night in which she disconcertingly calls upon the absent Brock to return,

settl[es] down into sleep, sleeping then unvisited till around dawn, with fog still in the hollows, deer and cows grazing together in the meadow, sun blinding in the cobwebs on the wet grass, a redtail hawk in an updraft soaring above the ridgeline. Sunday morning about to unfold, when Prairie woke to a warm and persistent tongue all over her face. It was Desmond [her lost dog], none other, the spit and image of his grandmother Chloe, roughened by the miles, face full of bluejay feathers, smiling out of his eyes, wagging his tail, thinking he must be home.

The recall of the novel's opening, where Zoyd awakes to "a squadron of blue jays stomping around on the roof," suggests symmetry, as the passage itself, read (if that is possible) with a deliberate absence of irony, suggests unity. But such a reading is, of course, out of the question. Whether structurally climactic or anticlimactic, whether tonally sentimental, melodramatic, or cartoonish, this incident and the others that lead up to it have about them the feel of myth transmogrified into parody. And nowhere more than in this description. Moving from the all too romantically picturesque to the deliberately whimsical and arch, it evokes such intertextual sources as Lassie Come Home and The Wizard of Oz and, in the process, dissolves the chapter's dissembled closure, along with the novel's intimations of Eros ascendant, in a farrago of pastoral farce.

I want to make clear that, in talking about the novel's ending, my intention is in no way to fault Pynchon for a failure to achieve New Critical aesthetic harmonies. Nor is it, alternatively, to praise him, by way of the newer poststructuralist aestheticism, for his refusal of totalizing visions, since the effect of this particular vision is not to defer or disseminate meaning but to rob it of its temporality. The issue, in other words, is not the lack of resolution, but its inversion in parody. Some could argue, I suppose, that Pynchon's picture-postcard conclusion is intended as a send-up of happy endings, whether transcendental or mundane, and that it therefore means to establish, precisely by way of parody, a more imperfect, precarious terrain for the meeting of self and world in the contingency of time. The reappearance of DL and Takeshi just a few pages before the novel's close would seem to support this reading, as does the report that is given of their most recent visit to the Kunoichi Retreat. Balancing her earlier story of Eden, Sister Rochelle now tells Takeshi a particularly opaque parable about hell, the point of which seems to be "that its original promise was never punishment but reunion, with the true long-forgotten metropolis of Earth Unredeemed." Certainly, Earth Unredeemed is very much the locus of Pynchon's concern in Vineland; and hints of moderated, earthly reunion follow as he describes the couple's departure in "the year the no-sex clause didn't get rolled over": "You could tell that the Head Ninjette was interested at least in a scientific way in whether the Baby Eros, that tricky little pud-puller, would give or take away an edge regarding the unrelenting forces that leaned ever after the partners into Time's wind."

To the degree that DL and Takeshi conjure up thoughts of Eros and, more importantly, to the degree that whatever hope Sister Rochelle imagines for them is at best hesitant, tentative, subject to the whims of "the faceless predators … who despite every Karmic Adjustment resource brought to bear so far had simply persisted," a case can be made for the novel's willing acceptance of time and uncertainty—and thus too for parody as a limited, world-salvaging, recuperative maneuver: Vineland's answer to Frenesi's timeless moments and Brock Vond's relentless logic of linear control. All of this is possible, even plausible, but problems persist nevertheless. Less easy to rationalize than this or that incident and far more difficult to convey is the actual experience of reading the novel: the immediacy of response that, even the second or third time around, precedes the sorting out. There are exceptions to what I'm about to say, and I've noted some of them, but on the whole, it appears to me that Vineland is a less poetic and impassioned book than Gravity's Rainbow. Evil is more commonplace, banal; good, even weaker and more ambiguous than it usually is in Pynchon's fictional world. That may be the reason why the novel's narrative and textural excesses register as more self-indulgent than heuristic. In other words, Pynchon's characteristic extremism focuses differently here. In place of the recurring rhetoric of salvation and possibility and, more particularly, in place of Lot 49's inconclusive, but intensely generative, "waiting"—its hedged promise of an alternative world hanging within or behind constellated ones and zeros—we are presented with a gallimaufry of conflicting, equivocal messages; an evasion, perhaps, of the unresolved tensions I've been discussing.

If, as indicated, the parodic scene of Prairie's awaking can be bent to the shape of the novel's morality, it is considerably harder to account for the equally parodic episode in which Brock Vond is so effortlessly rendered hors de combat. Despite the presence of Baby Eros, DL and Takeshi manage, after all, only to steal "a couple of innocent hours away from the harsh demands of their Act, with its imitations of defiance … of gravity and death." What sense, then, are we to make of the novel's urgent ethical message(s) in light of this too convenient disposal of the figure who throughout the book is death's chief emissary and its major embodiment of Thanatos? Only this, I think: that, possibly in unacknowledged response to all of Vineland's tensions and irresolutions, Pynchon at the last overreaches himself. Parody, less a recuperative maneuver than a personal dodge, comes across (in aesthetic terms) as self-indulgent play, and the effect is to vacate the book of the moral content that presumably underlies and validates its judgments both of characters and of America as garrison state. The most heteroclite of authors, Pynchon uncovers his own parodic emblem in "the Harleyite Order, a male motorcycle club who for tax purposes had been reconstituted as a group of nuns … [and who] pursued lives of exceptional, though antinomian, purity." It is to the Sisters that Zoyd looks for help in recovering his home, his friend, Van Meter, having "run across them in the course of his quest after the transcendent." Unfortunately, after their appearance on the Donahue show, the Sisters lose interest, both in transcendence and in Zoyd; but here too they are emblematic—this time, of Vineland's very different dereliction: its refusal of the existential commitment it ponders only to evade.