[ In Vineland, Thomas Pynchons dour 1990 novel, the author of
Gravity’s Rainbow anticipated a United States where all available
definitions of freedom are channeled through security apparatuses
understood as the greatest good. Sound familiar?]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE NOVEL AND THE SECRET POLICE  
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Peter Coviello
September 11, 2020
Boston Review
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_ In Vineland, Thomas Pynchon's dour 1990 novel, the author of
Gravity’s Rainbow anticipated a United States where all available
definitions of freedom are channeled through security apparatuses
understood as the greatest good. Sound familiar? _

Image: Wikimedia,

 

At the center of Thomas Pynchon’s antic and largely unloved 1990
novel _Vineland_ is a campus revolt. It transpires in the ripe
spring of 1969 and what Pynchon offers, in his account of the events
at “the College of the Surf,” is at once fantasia upon, parody of,
and elegy for that bygone season of upheaval. That last strain, the
elegiac, might surprise you. For despite the fact that, for long
stretches, _Vineland_ reads like an exercise in delirious comic
fabulation—the rebelling students, having chosen “to secede from
California,” name their new country “The People’s Republic of
Rock and Roll”—many of the scenes there get played straighter than
you’d imagine.

Reading the novel in 2020, it seems unnervingly prescient, with its
scenes of street-fighting militancy, brutal state reaction, and the
ramping up of the rabidly privatizing economic order we now call
neoliberalism.

The drama on this small beachhead of a campus, “bracketed by the two
ultraconservative counties of Orange and San Diego,” kicks off like
this: “In the midst of a noontime scene tranquil enough to have
charmed a statue,” we are told:

there arose, suddenly, the odor of marijuana smoke. That it was widely
and immediately recognized later led historians of the incident to
question the drug innocence of this student body, most of whom were
already at least in violation of the California mopery statutes about
Being In A Place where the sinister herb was burning. The fateful
joint that day could have come, heaven knew, from any of the troop of
surer undesirables who’d lately been finding their way up the
cliffside and in among the wholesome collegians, bringing with them
their ‘stashes,’ consisting—up til now—mainly of stems and
seeds, which because of a mysterious anomaly in surfer brain chemistry
actually got them loaded but which produced in those they were trying
to ‘turn on’ only headaches, upper respiratory distress, shortness
of temper, and depression, a syndrome that till now the college kids,
not wishing to seem impolite, had pretended to find euphoric.

It’s all as outlandish as you could wish. (I have not even mentioned
the gigantic statue of Richard Nixon that gazes down, colossus-like,
upon the campus.) Even here, though, are contrary indications. For
this weed-fueled day of sudden liberation comes to a rapid crisis, as
“before long units from Laguna to Escondido were responding.” At
precisely this moment, the campus’s accidental revolutionary, Weed
Atman, finds himself jolted into new consciousness when he wanders
into the heart of the melee.

His thoughts were interrupted by a scuffle nearby. Three policemen,
falling upon one unarmed student, were beating him with their riot
sticks. Nobody was stopping them. The sound was clear and terrible.
‘What the hell,’ said Weed Atman, as a throb of fear went right up
his asshole. It was a moment of light, in which the true nature of the
police was being revealed to him.

Shorn of Pynchon’s habitual prolixity, the scene unfolds in direct
declarative bursts. None of which offers much ambiguity about the
novel’s, or the author’s, vision of the police: what they do, what
they’re for, who they _are_. _Strange_, you might think reading it
today, _I don’t recall the early nineties as a time of especially
acute antifascism_. But there it is.

For all that, _Vineland_ is pretty much nobody’s favorite Pynchon
novel. Published in 1990, the first of Pynchon’s novels to appear
after the Literary Event that was _Gravity’s Rainbow _(1973), it
was soon enough eclipsed by _Mason & Dixon_ (1997) and has been held
ever since in middling esteem. (One exception is Salman Rushdie’s
warmly appreciative review in the _New York Times_.) None of this is
unfair exactly: the novel is a baggy, digressive, shaggy dogish sort
of mess. It is _also_ among the most ludicrously funny novels,
sentence by sentence, you’re likely ever to read, as committed to
puns, punch lines, and a romping unbridled silliness as it is to
philosophic seriousness. Given the obscuring fogs of unjoyous,
exalting, _serious_ appraisal—call it, for short, _male_—that
have gathered around Pynchon and his works since the 1970s, it’s
easy to forget how cherishable a thing this is.

Here, to offer an offhand example, is protagonist Zoyd Wheeler,
recalling the cousin of his bride: “Zoyd remembered her, among the
roster of his in-law aunts, uncles, and cousins, as a tall florid girl
in a minidress that bore the image, from neck to hemline, of Frank
Zappa’s face, thus linking her in Zoyd’s mind somehow with Mount
Rushmore.” The whole undertaking is a lot like that.

 

Thomas Pynchon
From where we sit, though, it may be better even than this. The matter
is not just that _Vineland_ is a sweetly companionable sort of book,
heartsick and humane. I mean rather that it is hard, here in the
somehow-not-yet-done-with-us summer of 2020, to avoid feeling that it
is also unnervingly prescient, and that it is so not least in how it
stitches into coherence scenes of street-fighting militancy, brutal
state reaction, and the ramping up of a rabidly privatizing economic
order we have since taken to calling, a little gauzily,
“neoliberalism.” There are stark and distressing clarities on
offer even in slapstick, messy _Vineland_—about economy and
security, about the bringing of militarized counterinsurgency back to
the metropole, and above all about what the novel unblinkingly calls
“the true nature of the police.” And these, with each new day,
seem a little more vivid, a little more goddamn _realist_, and a
little less the stuff of stoned counterfactual invention.

[section separator]

_Vineland_ is among the most ludicrously funny novels, sentence by
sentence, you’re likely ever to read, as committed to puns, punch
lines, and a romping unbridled silliness as it is to philosophic
seriousness.

What, actually, is _Vineland_? The plot is baroque, but if you were
trying to be quick about it you might say that _Vineland_ tells the
history of twentieth-century U.S. political life through the story of
late-twentieth-century California. The novel takes place in Northern
California—the logging, pot-harvesting, fog-bound California, up
near Arcata and Eureka—in the ominous high Reaganite summer of 1984,
journeying back for extended passages to the late 1960s and early
’70s, and wending briefly as well through other scenes of political
promise, fracture, and turbulent radicalism, from Wobblies in the
teens to Hollywood during the blacklist.

Across these locales, _Vineland_ traces a welter of intersecting
lives. Among these are Zoyd, a post-counterculture doper, knockabout,
day laborer, and single dad; fourteen-year-old Prairie, Zoyd’s
daughter from a brief marriage; and Zoyd’s ex-wife Frenesi Gates,
child of blacklisted parents and grandchild of Wobblies, who abandoned
Zoyd and Prairie for one Brock Vond, an archvillainous prosecutor in
the Department of Justice. The action of the book is set into motion
when, after more than a decade during which Zoyd and Prairie have
hidden away in Northern California, the ceasefire between the four
begins suddenly to collapse. This is because Vond, orbiting in the
upper echelons of U.S. policing power, decides all bets are off, what
with Reagan in the White House, hippie-despiser Ed Meese seated at his
right hand, and the time therefore ideal for the once-and-for-all
rounding up of whatever subversive elements remain. Will the
prosecutor for Justice, riding down the strong currents of anti-drug
fervor and flag-waving Reaganism, succeed at last in bringing the
former radicals to heel? Will the unquiet dead rise again in
vengeance, or achieve some peace-granting karmic restitution? Will
Prairie meet her mom?

I’ve made it seem a shade cartoonish, which it is. (I have not even
mentioned the lawn care service founded by “a reader of forbidden
books” and therefore named The Marquis de Sod.) But to miss the
novel’s mournfulness would be to miss a lot. At once wounded and
rueful and shot through with gawping outrage—much of which leverages
its manic comedy—_Vineland_ is, you could say, a book about the
hard afterlives of U.S. insurrectionary politics: about the ascent of
Reaganite reaction, about the recurring and epochal shamelessness of
law-and-order tyrants, and about the slender possibilities for safe
haven, out in the sprawling wilds of American space, for renegades and
castaways, the unmoneyed and unreconciled, whose visions of the Good
Life square only very little with the state-sanctioned American Real.
Sweet and bumblingly parental Zoyd, with his Zappa aspect and his
unhealed heartbreak, is only one face the novel gives to the ranks of
those making their way through the Orwellian days.

The novel’s affection for dopers and thwarted insurgents, and for
the scenes they make, might well incline a person to write the whole
thing off as a species of Boomerish nostalgia, cued up for a sad era
of ascendant Yuppiedom. Let’s be fair about it and say: there is not
nothing to this. Linger with it long enough, though, and you’ll find
its heartsickness plays in a darker key. Frenesi comes into her own in
a “guerilla movie outfit” called the 24fps, whose practice is to
go to scenes of struggle and, cameras in hand, expose the lies of the
powerful. But they have a certain clarity, too, about what
“struggle” in this moment entails.

The informal slogan around 24fps was Che Guevara’s phrase,
‘Wherever death may surprise us.’ It didn’t have to be big and
dramatic, like warfare in the street, it could happen as easily where
they chose to take their witness, back in the shadows lighting up
things the networks never would—it might only take one cop, one
redneck, one stupid mistake, everybody on the crew could dig it,
though in the usual way it was too hard for most of them to believe
in, even when they began to learn with their bodies the language of
batons, high-pressure hoses, and CZ gas.

What binds the group together is something more than the
“idealism” favored by soft-focus PBS histories of the era. It is
rather a learned intimacy with the tactics and favored implements of
state violence. This intimacy, this less joyous version of carnal
knowledge, is what adheres them to one another, as well as to larger
scenes of action.

Pynchon’s law enforcement visionary sees that the American future
lies in the routing of all available definitions of freedom through
the ever-narrowing channel of security. His is a dream of a
never-ending war waged against elements internal to the nation.

The novel takes us repeatedly to the heart of those scenes. (Frenesi
and her partner in revolutionary action, the motorcycle-riding heroine
DL Chastain, discover one another in the midst of a Berkeley street
battle: a meet-cute for incendiary times.) But it scrutinizes no less
closely the wide array of carceral forces solidifying in opposition to
them. You might be forgiven for assuming that CAMP—“the infamous
federal-state Campaign Against Marijuana Planting”—is another of
the novel’s silly confections, invented by Pynchon to convey the
lunacy governing the police pursuit of the demon crop. But not so.
CAMP was every bit as real as COINTELPRO: a complexly organized task
force generated by the California Department of Justice, initiated in
1983, and involving “local, state, and federal partner
agencies”—indeed, it was the _largest _law enforcement task
force in the country in its day.

When, early on, Zoyd encounters a representative from the considerably
more fictive “NEVER”—the “National Endowment for Video
Education and Rehabilitation”—he shows real acuity about the
intricate funding structures proper to these entities. “Nice per
diem,” Zoyd says to a man who introduces himself as Dr. Dennis
Deeply. “You guys’re Federal?” To which Dr. Deeply replies:
“Bisectoral, really, private and public, grants, contracts. .
.” _Bisectoral_. It’s a fleeting but a telling moment—the
briefest of idiomatic reminders that, when authority speaks
in _Vineland_, it is quite ready to do so in the sanitized
nomenclature of administrative cogency, financialized bureaucracy,
public-private synergies. Not a lot of people, in 1984 or for that
matter 1990, were naming that idiom of power _neoliberalism_, though
of course eventually they would.

But authority, in _Vineland_, speaks in other tongues as well, as the
young people in the 24fps well know. The most harrowing of these are
to be found in the recesses of the nation’s intricate, immense
security apparatus. It’s true that, at choice moments, this provides
for Pynchon’s signature flights of stoner absurdism. Zoyd, set up
for arrest by Vond and his DEA stooges, returns with baby Prairie to
his Hermosa Beach bungalow to find “the biggest block of pressed
marijuana Zoyd had ever seen in his life, too big to have fit through
any door yet towering there, mysteriously, a shaggy monolithic slab
reaching almost to the ceiling.” Being hauled away in cuffs, Zoyd is
“led out through an audience of neighbors mostly staring in wonder,
or in forms of mental distress such as fear, at the tall prism, now
miraculously outside again, secured on a flatbed trailer, ready to be
hauled back to whatever spacious Museum of Drug Abuse it had been
borrowed from.”

It’s not all played for laughs, though. Vond personally orchestrates
the shock-troop invasion of the College of the Surf, where the benign
little campus uprising is put down with an unchastened brutality that,
reading it now, already seems less fictional than it did six months
ago.

By morning there were scores of injuries, hundreds of arrests, no
reported deaths, but a handful of persons unaccounted for. In those
days it was still unthinkable that any North American agency would
kill its own civilians and then lie about it. So the mystery abided,
frozen in time, somewhere beyond youthful absences surely bound to be
temporary, yet short of planned atrocity. Taken one by one, after all,
given the dropout data and the migratory preferences of the time, each
case could be accounted for without appealing to anything more
sinister than a desire for safety.

Among the piercing things to notice here is that swift drawing
together of “atrocity” and “safety.” For Vond, Pynchon’s law
enforcement visionary, has seen the future, and knows it to lie not
solely with the FBI and its COINTELPRO protocols, nor with the
Department of Justice, where the DEA is housed, nor even with CAMP,
whose helicopters, at harvest time, “gathered in the sky and North
California, like other U.S. pot-growing areas, once again rejoined,
operationally speaking, the Third World.” (The shadow of the
Iran–Contra affair falls decisively across much of the novel’s
police action.) He sees, more largely, that the American future lies
in the routing of all available definitions of freedom through the
ever-narrowing channel of security. His is a magisterial vision of a
republic fashioned, top to bottom, on the model of a never-ending war
waged against elements internal to the nation. Given the provenance of
so many of these tactics in scenes of imperial conflict—from
Southeast Asia to Latin America to the Middle East—you could do
worse than to think of this as a dream of _perpetual
counterinsurgency_, brought back to what we have for some time now
been calling the Homeland. That dream nourishes itself even now—as
surely you know—in places such as Portland, Louisville, Minneapolis,
and Kenosha.

And so, like many who would succeed him, Vond regards the College of
the Surf less as a threat than a practice run, a chance to game out
live-action variables. “‘It’s a laboratory setup,’ Brock
argued, ‘a Marxist mini-state, product of mass uprising, we don’t
want it there and we also don’t want to invade—how then to
proceed?’ . . . It would also, as Brock pitched it, have value as a
scale model, to find out how much bringing down a whole country might
cost.” The turn to “cost” strikes the note. For
if _Vineland _is a novel about the ascent of neoliberalism, it takes
care to identify that political order not solely with
market-triumphant privatization and the marginless financialization of
civic existence, but also with the carceral forces, the baton-wielding
counterinsurgent armies, required to secure it. Put all this
together—the gleeful impunity, the DEA hysteria, the wars abroad
against black and brown people reimported as domestic wars against
Black and brown people—and what you get is a full vision of
Pynchon’s United States, circa 1984, but also circa 1990 (and also,
echoingly, thereafter): a “scabland garrison state” where freedom
is whatever you have left after the agents of security have had their
way.

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If _Vineland _is a novel about the ascent of neoliberalism, it takes
care to identify that political order not solely with
market-triumphant privatization and the marginless financialization of
civic existence, but also with the carceral forces required to secure
it.

A novel of riotous post-hippie nostalgia; a novel about the frightful
ascent of carceral-minded counterinsurgency, positing the late 1960s
less as inaugural moment than as decisive instance of
consolidation: _Vineland_ is all these things, which makes it easy
to imagine how, thirty years ago, it puzzled even critics favorable to
Pynchon’s daffiness, his prolixity, his career-long antifascism.
Just think of all that _hadn’t_ happened yet: the first Gulf War,
welfare to workfare, the Great Recession—to say nothing of 9/11 and
the resultant collapse of any major-party opposition to the logic of
security as freedom, safety as the greatest and only
good. _Vineland_ came before all that.

I was first induced to read it one summer back in the techno-optimist
early nineties, because a group of friends had been passing it around
between them all season like a newfound intoxicant everybody needed a
hit off of. We _loved_ it, with the stupid fervor usually reserved
for bands and records. We loved its affection for the hapless but
ineradicable decency of miscreants like Zoyd. We loved its
inventiveness and semi-deranged comedy, the anarchic delightedness we
did not much associate, then, with Serious Literature. And of course
we were flattered, bookish as we were, by its inanely recondite lore.
(As in: “Fortunately, Ralph Wayvone’s library happened to include
a copy of the indispensable _Italian Wedding Fakebook_, by Deleuze &
Guattari.”) All the unspooling syntax, the madcap in-joking, the
doper fantasia—what was not to love?

But then, sweet and benighted children of the Clintonite nineties that
we also were, what the actual fuck did we know? Now I know that you
can spend a lot of time thinking _Gravity’s Rainbow _is just a
batshit fugue hallucination of World War II before realizing it is
also a counter-historical argument about the continuity—the occluded
non-antagonism—between capitalism and fascism. But then? Then I just
took _Vineland_ for a gleeful demented romp, lit up by beautiful
righteousness, through a long era of dissent and counterreaction.

Everything about _Vineland_ feels different now, because of course
it does. Here in the high season of Trumpian noxiousness, with its
Border Patrol armies, its forced-labor marches toward exposure to
illness and pandemic death, and now this intranational urban strike
“surge,” how could it not? What else is there to see, at this
point, but the truncheon coming down, Black life held cheap, the true
nature of the police? Who, by now, would not discern the corrosive
dread_, _murmuring beneath the expansive laughter? Once you
do, _Vineland_ catches the light in a different way. It hasn’t
become less sad, and certainly not less funny. But read it today, in
the midst of our own fever dream of penal sociality, and you are
liable to be taken aback by the clarity of its insistence that a style
of carceral fanaticism—a making over of everyday life into the image
of perpetual security crisis—is no less a signature of the thing we
call neoliberalism than are manic privatization, oligarchic dominion,
and the total absorption of public life into market imperatives.
Uproarious and joy-propounding as it is, _Vineland_ is a novel of
acute political grief—a thing as near to us as it has ever been, and
likely to get nearer.

_[Essayist Peter Coviello is Professor of English at the University of
Illinois-Chicago. His most recent books are Long Players: A Love
Story in Eighteen Songs
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as one of ARTFORUM’s Ten Best Books of 2018—and Make Yourselves
Gods: Mormons and the Unfinished Business of American Secularism
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