Spectres of Marx in Thomas Pynchon's Vineland

Abstract

ABSTRACT Thomas Pynchon's Vineland (1990) examines how political demonology forges consensus in America. Tracking the manipulative deployment of a conspiratorial enemy, Vineland envisions American history as repetition. The novel examines the traumatic consequences of the paranoid fantasies constructing American social reality in the history of the Traverse-Becker family and the Thanatoids. By making use of the rival theories of spectrality proposed by Derrida and Žižek, I demonstrate how Vineland explores the victims of a countersubversive tradition that repeatedly exploits political paranoia to secure the status quo in changing historical circumstances. Moreover, the novel presents an alternative to official history in what Walter Benjamin calls “revolutionary nostalgia.”