"Dangerously Absent Dreamers": Genealogy, History and the Political Left in Vineland

Abstract

In presidential election year 1 984, American liberal left, gaping mouth, found itself having already experienced four years of Reagan presidency, and about to face four more. How had America arrived at such point, when only twenty years before, Goldwater's defeat had marked Reagan as staunch proponent of seemingly outdated ideas (Dallek 30)? Where was that liberal activism when Reagan was elected in 1980, with only 28 percent of eligible vote (60)? What kind of political environment would allow former movie and television actor to assume powerful role of president of United States? In Vineland, Pynchon looks at America during that election year and elaborates, in form of genealogy of heroine Frenesi Gates, its political malaise through narrative representation of twentieth-century American left's history and cooptation. Although many factors contributed to eclipsing left's influence, Pynchon focuses on cultural apparatus that simultaneously excuses and lays blame on victim/participant-the apparatus of radio, film and television, whereby viewers are interpellated, according to Althusserian definition, and come to desire their own commodification. Finally, Pynchon encourages us to read Vineland through lens of traditional family values, thus establishing reading code which provides framework and closure for novel, suggesting to some readers the possibility of redemption, a yearning for transcendence (Porush 98, 104), or recuperated salvation (Hayles 77–91). Instead, however, this code functions as what Fredric Jameson describes as a preparation for principal narrative … [as] means to more unexpected end (163). In unconscious of this principal narrative, reader discovers both shady political presence looming like Vineland's absent monster that left its footprint where Chipco lab used to be, and an indictment of transcendent and history that results from our turning toward it.