I’m stealing this from Quarterly Conversation. Kudos to Donald Brown for coining (I think) the term that Pynchon’s Inherent Vice brings to birth. Now I am indeed even more ashamed that I skimmed the last fifty pages of the book. Might have to go back and savor. What Brown describes as Pynchon’s use of music (in the full article) makes me think I could pair Vice with Murakami’s After Dark and claim that they both launch the freak noir genre.
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In other words, it’s not that Inherent Vice, if filmed, would be in any sense co-opted. Rather it seems in some ways plotted for that eventuality. It doesn’t really matter if the novel actually gets made into a Hollywood film, the point is that Pynchon has come as close as possible, for him, to writing a Hollywood film. It could be that Pynchon wants us to see Doc, likeable as he is, as just another deluded stoner who failed to see the signs of the times, but it’s more in keeping with the spirit of the book that we see Doc as another version of “geist” that’s “polter” as well as “zeit,” and what that means is being willing and able to understand pop culture as the only means of having common cause with the energies of any given day. The ironies that were available in Vineland, between “the way we were” in the ’60s and “the way we live now” in the ’80s, have been flattened into an unabashed “period movie.”
A telling instance of this change is in the handling of songs within the Pynchon “movie.” With his penchant for song parodies, Pynchon has always included in his fiction musical renditions that are recognizable as certain types of songs, whether show tunes or folk or pop songs. That feature continues in Inherent Vice but, in keeping with its more filmable aspects, the songs are for the most part “legitimate”—in other words, they appear when someone is listening to a radio or actually performing a song for others, as the novel’s hero Doc Sportello does, in a “Sinatroid” manner, late in the novel. We aren’t in a demented Hollywood musical any more, Toto, where people burst into outrageous songs for no apparent reason.
Indeed, ever since surfacing as an author—rather than simply the voice of an outlaw narrator—Pynchon has worked quotations from actual songs, often ascribed, into his prose. A tendency begun in the intro to Slow Learner, and continued in Vineland, has become in Vice even more clued-in to the notion of a soundtrack that’s being referenced because we can imagine it playing as we read. We can speak of this as “mediation” if we wish, but the effect implies that we’ve moved beyond having to pretend there exists a version of any 20th-century era—whether in fact (as a memory to be recalled) or as history (to be consulted via research)—that isn’t permeated with the music and movies of the time. Indeed, if the outsiders have come inside it’s because, perhaps, inside and outside of a “mainstream” or “straight” culture no longer make sense in the same way. Linked to that perception is the extent to which Pynchon’s “useful substances”—namely marijuana and LSD—and rock’n’roll create what Vice presents as an almost Proustian sense of what outsiderness once consisted of. In other words, if we think of how certain musical phrases and substances (a madeleine soaked in tea) confer a recall of place and time upon Proust’s narrator, we can find a “hip” version of that recherche into times lost via certain rock songs and the ever-present reefer in Inherent Vice, the mood of which seems to endorse this rather Proustian passage from Vineland: “And these acid adventures, they came in those days and they went, some we gave away and forgot, others sad to say turned out to be fugitive or false—but with luck one or two would get saved to go back to at certain later moments in life.” The narrator of these lines has, in a sense, passed to the narrator of Inherent Vice the wherewithal—still potent, smoking, and not yet played out—to “go back” to those moments.
And it’s that Proustian aspect of Inherent Vice—the sense of the past not as gone for good, finished, but as still firing certain synapses under the right conditions—that becomes clearer if we take into account how Pynchon’s three stagings of the period differ due to the context in which they appear. For the further we get from the period itself—that period in which Johnson’s Great Society gave way to the Nixonian reaction—the less seems to be at stake in evoking it. Watching this movie might “take you back,” but it’s not going to change anything you already think about what went down.
Lot 49 is set in 1964 with Goldwater a viable candidate against Johnson, but, in the year after the death of Kennedy, an unlikely victor; it’s also the year of the Tonkin resolution, so that the mention of Viet Nam in the novel is very much in the nature of current events. Published in 1966, the novel appears in the first flush of the Great Society and clearly points to the undercurrent of counter-cultural operations, both on the Left and on the Right, that might be said to be vying for the allegiance of Oedipa Maas, Pynchon’s Young Republican housewife experiencing paranoia as a potential illumination about the actual status of the U.S. The force of the novel comes in part from the fact that it’s not clear in which direction the country is going; Oedipa, in a sense, has her “consciousness raised,” to use a phrase that would become familiar in the later Sixties, but is the vision of America she has arrived at a paranoid fantasy or a view of what is actually rotten at the heart of the American dream?
Vineland, set in the year of Reagan’s re-election as president, appeared in print just after the Berlin Wall fell, an event that indicated the end of the Cold War that had governed, very deliberately, the concerns of Pynchon’s earlier fictions, from the exploration of political crisis points in V. to that unavoidable bomb falling upon us all at the close of GR. In other words, Vineland was uniquely placed to herald the return to a version of Sixties mentality in the grunge movement in rock and the rehashing of the Vietnam War in the candidacy of Bill Clinton, the first elected president younger than Pynchon himself. That fact alone might indicate why it seemed to many as if Pynchon were simply engaging in fond nostalgia for the times of his youth, but to consider Vineland as no more than that misses how fully engaged it is with its present moment—fully as much as Lot 49 was with the ‘64-’66 period.
Reagan’s dissatisfaction with the elected government in Nicaragua in 1984 prompted efforts to undermine that government. In the novel, Reagan’s plans for a full-scale invasion of Nicaragua are alluded to, indicating that the detention camp to which Frenesi is sent is in place to corral the protestors that are expected to arise, in the manner of anti-Vietnam War protestors, once the invasion gets under way. In other words, the novel conceives of 1984, twenty years after the setting of Lot 49, as potentially the occasion for a reaction against Reagan’s policies that would mean those who fought him as governor in Berkeley and elsewhere would now have to fight him as president. The fact that Congress revoked funding for such an invasion and interdicted aid to the Contras is alluded to in the novel by the sudden yanking of funding for Vond’s project of rounding up Frenesi, her daughter, and anyone else he chooses. In other words, the position of the novel isn’t so much “paranoid” as deeply distrustful of the Reagan administrations manifest—and ultimately covert—intentions. The “They” is clearly also “Us” if by the latter we mean the United States, eventually found guilty by the International Court of Justice for violating international laws in its support of the Contras. If GR is a major statement of outlaw status toward history and official culture generally, Vineland can be said to be a more local statement, aimed at the Reagan-Bush and Bush-Quayle administrations, but also well aware of how little use the renegade druggies were in political terms in the Sixties and how even more dispersed their energies are in the Eighties. As Hector Zuñiga harangues Zoyd, Prairie’s dad, about the sanctimonious Sixties ethos: “Who was saved?”
And what of Vice: this most amiable of throwback narratives is set at the time when California dreaming is significantly eclipsed by the Manson murders and Nixon’s first year in office. The tone of the novel, under its levity, shares a mood found in such effective accounts of that era as Hunter Thompson’s statement, from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1971): “‘Consciousness Expansion’ went out with LBJ . . . and it is worth noting, historically, that downers came in with Nixon.” What he alludes to is that the use of psychedelics and hallucinogens as a means to “zap” reality and maintain “a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning” is passed or passing in 1970. Similarly, in her essay “The White Album,” Joan Didion states that for many people she knew “the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community . . . . The paranoia was fulfilled.” So that whether you date the end of the Sixties from Nixon taking office in January, 1969, or to the Manson murders—in which one particularly demented version of freak culture rose up against the straights—in August, 1969, or to the murder and violence at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, CA in December, 1969, where rock claimed a sacrificial victim, the point is that a way of telling time, historically, for “us,” for many people we know, a sense of collective purpose or zeitgeist has reached a moment of consciousness.
But what does that moment of consciousness entail for the narrative of Inherent Vice itself? It seems to exist primarily as a “flashback,” a way of dovetailing certain pregnant moments, in an almost Proustian way, so as to suggest continuity, perhaps even clairvoyance, but only as a means of asserting the view of the individual as not quite trapped in time past. One way of saying this, in narrative terms, is that Doc, as Pynchon’s most actable character, is also closest in some ways to his creator, or, better, that the narrator of Inherent Vice is never too far removed from Doc. So that Doc, in looking ahead at the end of the novel, is dovetailing with his narrator looking back. Indeed, it seems, from internal evidence, that Inherent Vice ends on Thomas Pynchon’s 33rd birthday, May 8, 1970, the night the Lakers lost game seven to the Knicks (alluded to at the start of the book’s final chapter). On that night, Doc Sportello drives the Santa Monica Freeway in dense fog, fortuitously linking in a “caravan” with the car lights of other travelers for safety.
The drive might recall the drive with Richard Zhlubb at the close of GR and also, not coincidentally, the very night (or rather 4 a.m. on May 9, 1970) that Nixon made an unscheduled appearance to “rap” with protestors at the Lincoln Monument about the bombing of Cambodia and the shootings at Kent State, but is also reminiscent of Hunter Thompson’s ruminative drives in Fear and Loathing (significantly, Thompson recounts his ride in a car with Nixon in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ‘72). The drive might also bring to mind Oedipa Maas, in The Crying of Lot 49, driving on the freeway at night “with her lights out to see what would happen.” Thus these dovetailings hover around the moment much as the palimpsest of past moments come at the bidding of a particular temporal trigger in Proust, but the moments are more internal, even if collective, rather than political. They make of the narrator, and of Doc, not outsiders of a mainstream, but riders within the stream of a certain sense of historical and narrative circumstance, a bringing together of past and future.
Doc wondered how many people he knew had been caught out tonight in this fog, and how many were indoors fogbound in front of the tube or in bed just falling asleep. Someday . . . there’d be phones as standard equipment in every car, maybe even dashboard computers. People could exchange names and addresses and life stories and form alumni associations to gather once a year at some bar off a different freeway exit each time, to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog.
Here the collectivity isn’t an outlaw culture, it’s rather a haphazard community of communications freaks, linked via cellphone and web technology. It still conjures Oedipa’s vision, at the end of Lot 49, of an alternative America searching in the night for “that magical Other.” But it’s far less apocalyptic in tone than Pynchon’s writing in the Sixties, and far less saturated with the edgy disjunction between a then (the Sixties) and a now (the Eighties) than Vineland. Inherent Vice gives us a mellower view of the end of the Sixties than either Thompson or Didion, writing as it went down, do; Pynchon’s narrator, in the twenty-first century, is able to “look ahead,” as Doc, to the eventual outsider mainstream of DIY enthusiasms of our day, with perhaps an oldster’s somewhat ironic suggestion that all such connections are ultimately as transient, and fleetingly graceful, as a caravan of cars in a fog.
Published in the first year of the administration of Barack Obama, “a magical Other” whose campaign was notable for its use of the connective technologies of the Internet and for appeal to a youth movement of voters, Inherent Vice can perhaps be forgiven for being largely light-hearted, as though some kind of major karmic readjustment might now be taking place. And yet . . . Doc does come to the realization that he’s ultimately working for Them, the special interests that have their own reasons for making use of his talents for goals never quite divulged to him. And while he would like to imagine, when the fog burns away, “something else this time, somehow, to be there instead,” first of all, the fog has to lift, and, in terms of 1970, what would be revealed are the bummers that Thompson, Didion, and Pynchon himself, in GR, attest to. In terms of our current moment, the “something else” still sounds like a willed version of that “other America” Oedipa tries to glimpse via W.A.S.T.E., and that Mason and Dixon experience even as they commit themselves to the effort to corral and contain it.
Pynchon, perhaps simply resting after his twin colossal efforts to imagine “something else” in Mason & Dixon and Against the Day, has provided a droll and friendly romp about the way it used to be, but, unlike for Proust, the avenues Pynchon frequents are not necessarily as “fugitive, hélas comme les années” if only because of our ability to revisit the movies, the music, the acid adventures, effectively zapping our minds back to when it was possible to be an outsider and to disappear like Slothrop at the end of GR. But this time it’s done as a feature film, not one with the quick-cuts and various media and cinema verité footage that Prairie watches to learn what went down, but a genre—freak noir?—that might, if done well, look like a film that could’ve shown up on late night TV back in the day. Rather than translating the world into an anarchic film with a freak sensibility, Inherent Vice simply enacts that sensibility, for an audience poised to receive it, as remembrance of things past.
Donald Brown reviews poetry, fiction, and theater for The New Haven Review and The New Haven Advocate. He has published on Pynchon in Poetics Today and in Modern Language Studies.
