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Thomas Pynchon

 | 
Bénédicte Chorier-Fryd
, 
Gilles Chamerois

Virtual Structures and Virtuality in The Crying of Lot 49 and Inherent Vice

Stephen C. Lento

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1Several critics have seen Pynchon’s early work as a forecast of computer technologies that, in the mid-1960s, were either on the technological horizon or just beginning to emerge in research labs. For example, Brian Stonehill has argued that Pynchon’s early novels are “prophecies of cyberspace” in which Pynchon denigrates the binary mode of thought associated with computer technology since it seems to close off the vibrant possibilities that the analog world offers (11). At the same time, however, Stonehill reads Pynchon as also embracing the life-affirming potential that might be found in the global communications networks that preceded the modern Internet: “There’s thus a central tension between Pynchon’s suspicion of the digital realm and his hinting that the Earth itself is a sentient creature. And this tension is prophetic, since if the planet is growing itself a nervous system, that global neural web might well resemble the Internet” (12). Phillip Gochenour argues that, in The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon develops a theory of distributed subjectivity that American culture has only recently been able to catch up to with the advent of “virtual communities, nodal subjectivity and broad-based cultural movements such as rave culture” (41). He argues that “Pynchon’s anarchist miracle can be characterized as a new type of relation established among individual elements, each of which functions as a node or relay point in a complex network” (43). The networked consciousness that Gochenour sees in Lot 49 emerged in Pynchon’s psyche well before it was fully embodied in computer networks. Likewise, Christopher J. McKenna argues in “A Kiss of Cosmic Pool Balls” that Lot 49 is structured on personal computing paradigms such as the graphical user interface, networked computers, and object-oriented programming. Although these technological paradigms would not be widespread until roughly a decade after Lot 49 was written, McKenna suggests that Pynchon’s general technical knowledge “support [s] the borrowing of a set of paradigms from the intermedia art of technology in order to examine parallel aspects of Pynchon’s own application, The Crying of Lot 49” (39).

2Pynchon’s fiction is visionary, but to see him as a technological seer is to miss the extent to which both his fiction and the technology he prefigured were influenced by the same political and ideological forces that gripped much of 1960s California. Pynchon was prescient about the directions that computer technologies would take because he was enmeshed in the counter-cultural currents that influenced computer researchers in California as they were building those technologies. As he created Lot 49’s Trystero—a distributed network of oddballs on the fringes of American culture, —researchers at the University of California Berkeley and Stanford were simultaneously laying the groundwork for an interconnected network of microcomputers. It was not a coincidence that the fictional Trystero and the primitive computer network that would become the Internet emerged from the same time and place. Pynchon might have been aware of the technological developments taking place up the coast in San Francisco as he was working on Lot 49, and the early Internet may have provided direct inspiration. However, even if we do not think that Pynchon had direct knowledge of the computer science developed during the era, we can nevertheless explain the similarities between networks of computers and his imagined underground networks through what Slavoj Žižek has described as the “futur anterieur.” Žižek argues in “The Cyberspace Real” that “technology and ideology are inextricably intertwined,” so that technology frequently expresses ideological beliefs, and ideology gives rise to artistic “procedures which, at least from our retroactive view, seem to point towards a new technology that will be able to serve as a more ‘natural’ and appropriate ‘objective correlative’ to the life-experience the old forms endeavoured to render” (§9). Pynchon’s Trystero tried to give expression to a cultural paradigm that would be more “naturally” expressed in the language of Cyberspace. The Trystero and computer networks can both be read as attempts to express the new countercultural ideas that were floating around California in the 1960s.

3In What the Dormouse Said, John Markoff chronicles the intersections between the revolutionary attitudes that dominated California’s social scene and the researchers responsible for laying the groundwork for the modern computer industry. He argues that the “computer technologies that we take for granted today owe their shape to this unruly period [of 1960s California], which was defined by protest, experimentation with drugs, countercultural community, and a general sense of anarchic idealism” (xii). Computer scientists were intoxicated by an atmosphere that seemed to promise social revolution; they thought that their work could empower people and help to reorganize society in a way that would be free of the constraints of centralized authority.

4Although the technology that would make personal computing possible wasn’t developed until later, the “idea of personal computing was born in the sixties” (xi). At the time, personal computing was a revolutionary idea because the “notion that one person should control all of the functions of a computer and that the machine would in turn respond as an idea amplifier” seemed antithetical to the dominant paradigm in which computers were large, expensive machines owned by and operated for the benefit of corporations and governments (x). The personal computing paradigm materialized within a community of researchers who were committed to “a counterculture that rejected authority and believed the human spirit would triumph over corporate technology, not be subject to it” (xv). This vision of countercultural computing was, for those able to see the future of the technology, “the mind-expanding equivalent of taking a psychedelic drug” (x). Indeed, as Markoff shows, many of the researchers responsible for the creation of personal computers and the network that unites them in a single web, were partially inspired by their experiences with LSD. In short, the same countercultural forces that seem to have influenced Pynchon as he created the Trystero helped to shape the technologies that critics have argued Pynchon anticipated.

5At the heart of Lot 49 is the Trystero, a network of individuals connected via the underground W.A.S.T.E. postal system. The Trystero and cyberspace share a similar, distributed structure. Individual people each pursuing a different agenda collaboratively construct the Trystero as they communicate via the W.A.S.T.E. system; individual computers give rise to cyberspace as they send messages back and forth along miles of telecommunications cables. The structure Pynchon creates, as Gochenour indicates, presents a vision of subjectivity that is spread among many individual nodes. What Gochenour calls a “nodal subject” is created when multiple selves function “in concert to create the illusion of a unified subject” (43). As with the Internet, in which multiple computers create the illusion of a unified cyberspace, Pynchon’s vision of subjectivity in Lot 49 is one in which individuals join together to create a larger, virtual structure. This means that as more nodes are added to each network, the virtual space of both the Trystero and the Internet changes. This feature of virtual space seems important to Pynchon because it offers both a path towards collective activity and a way to remain individual. Rather than a totalitarian paradigm in which the individual gives up his identity to become part of the transcendent whole, a virtual paradigm enables one to join together with others in a way that is far more flexible. The shape of the virtual space is created through the collaborative actions of multiple agents, rather than imposed from the top of the hierarchy.

6Pynchon draws inspiration for this collaborative virtuality from the technologies of the 1960s. In Lot 49 virtual collaboration is modeled after both the collaborative activity that takes place in The Scope, a San Narciso bar, and the oscilloscope technology which lends its name to the bar. As Pynchon describes it, “The Scope proved to be a haunt for electronics assembly people from Yoyodyne. The green neon sign outside ingeniously depicted the face of an oscilloscope tube, over which flowed an ever-changing dance of Lissajous figures” (34). Marcus Erbe sees the neon oscilloscope and its Lissajous figures as signals that the bar is an otherworldly place. Erbe suggests that the “aesthetic quality” of the figures traced on the screen “might be the reason Lissajous figures sometimes appeared in science-fiction movies of the 1950s and ’60s, to add a futuristic look. . . . This medial shift of emphasis sheds a comparable futuristic and bizarre light on Pynchon’s bar” (101). He goes on to argue that in his description of the music played in The Scope, Pynchon merges opposing aspects of jazz and electronic music (101). The Scope is, indeed, a space in which differing perspectives can be merged; however, the oscilloscope provides a much more central role in facilitating this collaborative atmosphere. The machine is a model for virtual activity in the novel since it combines different vibrational activities into a single representational figure.

7The bar itself is like a larger-sized oscilloscope, and the neon sign metaphorically measures the vibrational frequencies of all those inside. As Eli Maor explains in his textbook, Trigonometric Delights, a Lissajous figure is the visual representation of the combined movement of two oscillating signals (145). The figures are named after Jules Lissajous, who in 1855

devised a simple optical method for studying compound vibrations: he attached a small mirror to each of the vibrating objects (two tuning forks, for example) and aimed a beam of light at one of the mirrors. The beam was reflected first to the other mirror and thence to a large screen, where it formed a two-dimensional pattern, the visual result of combining the two vibrations. This simple idea—a forerunner of the modern oscilloscope—was a novelty in Lissajous’ time, for up until then the study of sound depended solely on the process of hearing, that is, on the human ear. Lissajous literally made it possible to “see sound.” (145)

8The oscilloscope traces Lissajous figures on a phosphorescent screen by measuring the frequencies of two oscillating signals, and combining them into a single visual representation. The two variable inputs create a third element that takes the form of a Lissajous curve on the screen. The figures are generated by the fluctuations being measured; they are a virtual representation of those fluctuations that exist in a format that is entirely other: no longer voltages over time, they have become patterns of photons on a screen.

9Both Scope and oscilloscope are metaphors that describe Pynchon’s philosophy of virtual collaboration. The oscilloscope unites two distinct signals into one visual representation. It therefore shares certain affinities with cyberspace in that it translates the complex interaction of these two signals into a visual, spatial representation of that underlying complexity. The combinatory and transformational qualities of the oscilloscope reflect a similar process taking place within the bar. Inside the Scope, various forms of collaboration take place. As a “hip greybeard” tells Œdipa, the bar is the only one “in the area [. . . that] has a strictly electronic music policy. Come around Saturdays starting midnight we have your Sinewave Session, that’s a live get-together, fellas come in just to jam from all over the state” (34). To facilitate this collaboration, The Scope has a back room full of “audio oscillators, gunshot machines, contact mikes, everything man. That’s for if you didn’t bring your ax, see, but you got the feeling and you want to swing with the rest of the cats, there’s always something available” (34). This musical collaboration is possible only because of the readily available electronic machines hidden in that back room. If we take the Scope as the meeting place for various flavors of oddball, we can see their interactions within the bar as producing, on the sign outside, the Lissajous figures endlessly dancing in neon.

10Each occupant of the Scope is there for his or her own reasons, but the interactions between these individuals produce the virtual “Scope.” The structure produced in this way serves as a collaborative space that allows people to join in various ways. Nose pickers, communists, and technology workers all come together under the sign of the Lissajous figure; the bar is both a physical space and a conceptual frame that lets us consider everyone inside as part of a collective whole. This radical shift in perspective from the individual inputs of people in the bar to the Scope as a space created by collaboration is part of the experience of virtuality. Comparable to a shift from speech to text that makes a speaker virtual—both present and absent at the same time—we are dealing with a virtual construction whenever we make this sort of conceptual leap. The physical desktop becomes the virtual desktop on our computers, the oscillating inputs become the Lissajous curve on the screen of the oscilloscope, and the activity of everyone in the Scope becomes the constantly changing neon sign outside the bar. Žižek describes a similar situation in which individual cells become conceptualized as parts of a single, unified body. He suggests that “[a]t the level of reality, there are only bodies interacting; ‘life proper’ emerges at the minimally ‘ideal’ level, as an immaterial event which provides the form of unity of the living body as the ‘same’ in the incessant changing of its material components” (Parallax 204). In the case of the Scope, this shift to a virtual construction also enables us to see the individual actions of participants as part of a collaborative whole, without having to imagine a central organizing authority that guides the whole. The union of the individuals is accomplished from within the bar. The multiplicity of perspectives produces the unified, if “ever-changing,” Lissajous figure. Unity is not enforced from the top down, but constructed from the bottom up.

11This, arguably, is also the structure of the Trystero. The varied actions of the individuals engaged in individual pursuits cohere along another plane, and becomes a virtual entity that has the capacity to encompass all those individuals without becoming authoritative. Everyone Œdipa meets—and she begins to suspect by the novel’s end, all of America—is subsumed into the Trystero, but they are not forced to give up their individuality in this process. The Trystero itself is created through the combination of the individual vibrations of everyone belonging to it. This is a vision of virtuality inspired by the same cultural forces that gave rise to the technologies that would become the Internet. The computer technologies emerging during the 1960s seemed to offer possibilities to expand conceptions of the self, to bridge the gap between self and other, and to provide an avenue for collectivity that does not demand the abrogation of individuality. Pynchon, however, was skeptical about whether these technologies would fulfill the potential they had to enlighten. Lot 49 remains ambiguous about these possibilities, and it ends with Œdipa isolated and nearing mental breakdown.

12The desire for virtual cohesion haunts Inherent Vice, but cohesion has already evaporated as a real possibility. The culture can no longer support the leaderless collaboration held out as a possibility in Lot 49. With hindsight, Pynchon can see that the technologies of communication that showed such promise in Lot 49 did not lead to the enlightened revolution in subjectivity that he might have hoped for. Inherent Vice is set in 1970, and presents a world in which the collective joining represented in Lot 49 is already being prevented by the forces of control. Consequently, we are not presented with a vision of virtuality that is collaboratively constructed, but one that is already set in place and controlled by corporate and governmental interests. This shift from a collaboratively created virtual space to an already-established one in thrall to powerful interests intimates that for Pynchon the technologies and attitudes that might have once had a chance of fighting totalitarian interests have been usurped by those interests. The novel is an attempt to reconcile the sense of possibility in the virtual in 1966 with the realization that the virtual ultimately failed to be revolutionary. Inherent Vice is a history that tries to see if that sense of possibility was justified.

13The novel is suffused with the sense that the attitudes of psychedelic California that seem to be the start of something revolutionary are actually just delusions or worse: another tool the establishment can use to prevent revolution. For example, Doc, the doper private investigator at the heart of the novel, wonders if his sense of impending revolutionary enlightenment is justified as he drives LA’s freeways “under a sky like watered milk, and the white bombardment of a sun smogged into only a smear of probability, out in whose light you began to wonder if anything you’d call psychedelic could ever happen, or if—bummer! —all this time it had really been going on up north” (19). In Lot 49—up north—, the existence of the Trystero is uncertain, but the novel never seems to question whether this coalition of outsiders is possible. The undecidability of the Trystero’s ontological status rests on the fact that its existence and non-existence are equally likely. Inherent Vice seems to doubt not only if this sort of “groovy” network of outsiders exists, but also whether the conditions necessary for such a network to form are in place.

14The collaborative jamming that takes place in the Scope in Lot 49 can no longer be sustained in Inherent Vice. While the Scope’s back room is full of electronic audio equipment that enables musical collaboration, the back room of the office of Doc’s friend Fritz is instead full of a bewildering set of machines that connect to ARPAnet, the Department of Defense funded forerunner of the Internet. When Fritz opens the door to the back room,

[i]t was like being inside a science-fictional Christmas tree. Little red and green lights were going on and off everywhere. There were computer cabinets, consoles with lit-up video screens, and alphanumeric keyboards, and cables running all over the floor among unswept drifts of little bug-size rectangles punched out of IBM cards, and a couple of Gestetner copy machines in the corner, and towering over the scene all along the walls a number of Ampex tape reels busily twitching back and forth. (53)

15Doc and Fritz, influenced by the hippie culture, see this technology as a portal to enlightenment and mind-enhancement. There is a sense of awe when Fritz tells Doc that this is one part of “a network of computers. . . all connected together by phone lines. . . . All over the country, in fact the world, there’s new computers gettin plugged in every day. Right now it’s still experimental, but hell, it’s government money, and those fucker’s don’t care what they spend, and we’ve had some useful surprises already” (53–54). Instead of fellas coming from all over the state to use the technology available to them to jam together, computers are now doing the joining. The network is growing almost, it seems, without human intervention. Fritz indicates that it’s already too big to be known in its entirety, and that complexity gives him access to unwatched areas of the Government’s network. The virtual landscape is no longer thought of as something collaboratively created, but as something owned by the Government. Individuals do not contribute to the construction of the virtual; they only trespass on a virtuality already controlled by authoritative forces.

16Nevertheless, Doc infers that there might be something countercultural in the technology, even though it is paid for with government money, when he asks Fritz, “Does it know where I can score?” (54). There is something psychedelic about the technology, and as the narrator informs us, “if acid-tripping was good for anything, it helped tune you to different unlisted frequencies” (61). Hallucinogens and ARPAnet both enable their users to stumble upon “useful surprises.”

17Fritz and Doc understand ARPAnet as something that might enable a countercultural revolution. Fritz compares working the ARPAnet to a drug “trip,” saying that

“It’s like acid, a whole ’nother strange world—time, space, all that shit.”
[To which Doc asks,] “So when they gonna make it illegal, Fritz”. . . “Remember how they outlawed acid as soon as they found out it was a channel to somethin they didn’t want us to see? Why should information be any different?” (195)

18Doc and Fritz see anti-establishment collectivity in the technology; it is a tool that, like a hallucinogenic drug, changes the way they imagine time and space. The drug-like influence that Doc and Fritz see in ARPAnet gives them insight into the ways in which people are connected to one another that would otherwise be invisible. For Doc, “paranoia was a tool of the trade, it pointed you in directions you might not have seen to go” (117). “A private eye didn’t drop acid for years in this town without picking up some kind of extrasensory chops” (129).

19Sparky, the young man hired to run Fritz’s computers, however, doesn’t take the same view. In the final chapter of the novel, Doc visits Sparky at work. Sparky doesn’t do drugs, and doesn’t see the computer network as part of the drug continuum as Fritz does. As Sparky explains to Doc,

The system has no use for souls. Not how it works at all. Even this thing about going into other people’s lives? it isn’t like some Eastern trip of absorbing into a collective consciousness. It’s only finding stuff out that somebody else didn’t think you were going to. And it’s moving so fast, like the more we know, the more we know, you can almost see it change one day to the next. . . it all moves exponentially, and someday everybody’s gonna wake up to find they’re under surveillance they can’t escape. (365)

20Although the belief in the countercultural thrust of computer technology seems to be weakening from one generation to the next, the authoritative forces of government and capital are not willing to leave the risk of a nascent revolution to fizzle out on its own. The countercultural network that Pynchon once symbolized with the Trystero has been infiltrated by law enforcement. Doc notices this anti-subversive element in the California scene:

Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he’d seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everybody else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. . . . If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen. (129–30)

21Pynchon here expresses the fundamental shift from Lot 49’s virtuality to Inherent Vice’s. The Trystero is characterized by precisely this willingness to blur the boundaries of individual consciousness and to become part of a multiple self. But now undercover agents seem to be working from within the countercultural network to enforce strict boundaries of subjectivity. Doc considers what for him is an even more terrifying thought: that the willingness to transgress personal boundaries might have been, all along, nothing more than an Establishment ploy to control the nascent revolutionary forces. Doc wonders, “Was it possible, that at every gathering—concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever—those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?” (130). The dark crews oppose the hippie impulse to gather as a virtual whole. They reclaim the forces of the revolution by disrupting the hippie ability to join into a collectivity.

22Technology and capitalism have begun to join the dark crews of law enforcement in their efforts to counter that collectivity. Doc and a carload of others drive by a music store

where each of a long row of audition booths inside had its own lighted window facing the street. In every window, one by one as. . . [they] crept by, appeared a hippie freak or small party of hippie freaks, each listening on headphones to a different rock’n’roll album and moving around at a different rhythm. Like Denis, Doc was used to outdoor concerts where thousands of people congregated to listen to music for free, and where it all sort of blended together into a single public self, because everybody was having the same experience. But here, each person was listening in solitude, confinement and mutual silence, and some of them later at the register would actually be spending money to hear rock ’n’ roll. It seemed to Doc like some strange kind of dues or payback. More and more lately he’d been brooding about this great collective dream that everybody was being encouraged to stay tripping around in. Only now and then would you get an unplanned glimpse at the other side. (176)

23This is in stark contrast to Œdipa’s experience on the dance floor with the “deaf-mute delegates in party hats” who each dance “whatever was in the fellow’s head: tango, two-step, bossa nova, slop” (106–7). Despite the different dances each couple is engaged in, there are no collisions on the dance floor. They spontaneously merge together in a symphonic order. The only answer that Œdipa can give for this collision-less experience is “some unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed, easy, predestined” (107). The forces of technocapital have prevented the hippies from joining together as the outsiders of the Trystero had been able to.

24It isn’t enough to infiltrate the hippie network or to discourage them from gathering into a single public self with seductive technologies; law enforcement also directly counteracts the impulse towards collectivity. One police officer explains to Doc that since the Charlie Manson killings, they have instituted a new program designed to keep the fringe culture from becoming a threat. He tells Doc that “they’re calling it Cultwatch, every gathering of three or more civilians is now defined as a potential cult” (179).

25Inherent Vice, however, is not just an autopsy of the psychedelic era, pinpointing exactly when the revolution stopped being viable. It is also an attempt to revitalize the era, to retroactively inject the 1960s with a forgotten sense of possibility, and create a virtual history that, like the patterns on the oscilloscope, is combinatory and constantly shifting. Revolution is necessarily undecidable. It is only in retrospect that a tumultuous past event can be connected to a contemporary moment in a coherent narrative. Žižek speaks of a successful revolution as dependent on a prior failed one. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the Philosophy of History, Žižek describes the revolutionary move of “isolat[ing]”. . . a piece of the past from the continuity of history. This move counters the ruling class’s view of time as “the empty, homogeneous time of continuity (proper to the reigning, official historiography) and [replaces it with] the ‘filled’ time of discontinuity (which defines historical materialism)” (Parallax 153). A discontinuous view of time “redeems retroactively the past” by cutting through the continuous flow of (official) historical development (154). This is a revolutionary stance because, historically speaking, “the returns of the repressed, the ‘symptoms,’ are past failed revolutionary attempts, forgotten, excluded from the frame of the reigning historical tradition, whereas the actual revolutionary situation presents an attempt to. . . realize in the Symbolic. . . these past failed attempts” (158). In other words, by freezing the smooth-flowing narrative of history, we can, on a symbolic level, connect the present to a repressed past directly (that is, without an intervening historical narrative that would explain or justify this connection) and thereby recover the failed past through its repetition in the present. For Pynchon, what has been repressed about California’s psychedelic era, despite the proliferating images and histories of the time, is the sense of the undecidable possibility that suffused the decade. There was power in the inability to determine if one was in the midst of a revolution or just selfishly enjoying the party. Revolution can link the past event and the current event without a smooth-flowing narrative, and in this way the current revolution may redeem the prior one. But even the current revolution must be undecidable. Revolution can never be certain, otherwise it is not revolution but progress and susceptible to description by a traditional narrative history. The traumatic break in the free-flowing narrative of history is always fundamentally undecidable. Indeed, it is only after the fact that it can be seen as a break. It is that very undecidability that makes the revolution powerful. It is fundamentally different from the conditions that produced it, and therefore the events that come after it are unpredictable. The old rules no longer apply and new rules have yet to emerge. Alain Badiou discusses the moment of revolution as the emergence of a “truth-event,” something that happens outside of the current situation and has the power to rewrite all that we know about the situation. Although the event in one sense exists within the situation it is also completely outside of it: “The event is both situated—it is the event of this or that situation—and supplementary; thus absolutely detached from, or unrelated to, all the rules of the situation” (68). This moment of confusion during which the truth event emerges and threatens to change everything is revolutionary. This is precisely the feeling Pynchon is trying to recapture. He is trying to rekindle the sense of the undecidable.

26For Pynchon, the fact that the “forces of fear and greed” win out over the revolutionary impulses, that technology reinforces hegemony and fosters isolation rather than producing the anarchic utopia Markoff suggests the computer researchers had hoped for, in short the failure of the revolution and the acknowledgement thereof tend to bleed off all the undecidability of the era. The 1960s did not disrupt history; instead traditional histories have re-absorbed the discordant moment and paved over the uneven event. The epigraph Pynchon uses to introduce Inherent Vice—“under the paving stones, the beach!”—can be interpreted as a re-assertion of the existence of the pothole that is the revolutionary 60s. The traumatic moment can still be sensed beneath the smoothed-over narrative of history.

27The problem for Pynchon is how to remember the revolutionary event without turning it into nostalgia. We can contrast his strategy in Inherent Vice with the history presented in Vineland. That novel remembers the ’60s as exactly this sort of kitsch, through the campy lens of 1980s video culture. Video, with its promise of perfect fidelity, replaces any alternative histories and drains them of their revolutionary energy. Vineland filters the era through a memory influenced by the dominant technologies of the 1980s, and concludes that the revolutionary forces that were at a standstill with the authoritarian ones during the 60s can’t be sustained in an era of cheap video and personal computers. Vineland’s narrator describes the earlier era as “the Mellow Sixties, a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by television” (38). The implication is that cable television, the computer, and cheap digitization shift the balance; rather than serving to unite disparate energies into a cosmic Lissajous curve, these technologies have instead successfully fragmented any opposition to the establishment.

28The media system has made it impossible to imagine revolutionary energies outside of the safe borders of the television or film screen. Once defanged by the media, the revolutionary impulse becomes another entertainment venue in the service of conservative and authoritarian forces.

29Pynchon is aware that the revolutionary energies exemplified by characters like Frenesi and her daughter Prairie are easily usurped by the reactionary forces personified by Brock Vond, anti-drug FBI agent and Frenesi’s lover. Brock coerces Frenesi, a member of the revolutionary filmmaking collective, 24 fps, into planting a gun on Rex Snuvvle, the leader of another revolutionary group. She initially resists, saying, “I can’t bring a gun in the house” (241). Brock’s response clarifies the degree to which the culture of the image has been drained of any potential for revolution by the technocratic re-production of video:

But you can bring a camera. Can’t you see, the two separate worlds—one always includes a camera somewhere, and the other always includes a gun, one is make-believe, one is real? What if this is some branch point in your life, where you’ll have to choose between worlds? (241)

30Frenesi nicely summarizes the position the official forces have placed her in: “So either I pussy out or become a courier of death, wow, this is some swell choice you’re giving me” (241). She convinces herself to plant the gun, thinking that she can neutralize its power with revolutionary filmmaking. She believes

that with the gun in the house, the 24-frame-per-second truth she still believed in would find some new, more intense level of truth. . . . Light this little ’sucker here about eight to one, soften the specular highlights, start in on a tight close-up. . . draw back, incorporating the lovely, deadly thing in the master shot of tonight’s gathering, transfiguring the frame, returning at last to the invisible presences and unavoidable terms of which all she had up till now lit and made visible had been only the ghosts. . . . (241–2)

31She believes that there is revolutionary potential in the filmmaking process even as she uses that impulse to justify her acceptance of the Devil’s bargain to aid Brock in his neutralization of Rex’s movement. Brock uses Frenesi’s faith in the revolution, her feeling that it is inevitable, against her. As Pynchon’s narrator tells us,

Brock Vond’s genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep. . . need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. . . . They’d only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning. (269)

32The forces of the status quo have learned to manipulate the tools of the revolution to such a degree that it begins to become impossible to imagine a successful revolution at all.

33Vineland demonstrates that from the vantage point of 1980s, the 1960s seemed inevitably doomed. Inherent Vice moves away from this view and towards a sense of uncertainty more akin to that found in Lot 49. Towards the end of the novel, Doc worries that he might never be up early enough to find out if the enlightenment that seems to be gripping the area is real or only a “false dawn” (207). Even from Pynchon’s 21st century perspective, it is unclear if ARPAnet represents the start of something new and revolutionary (as Doc and Fritz hope) or just the start of a panoptic police state (as Sparky sees it). Thomas Schaub has argued that the value of Pynchon’s fiction lies in its “charismatic opposition,” rather than in positing workable alternatives (140). The fact that Doc can’t tell if he is experiencing enlightenment or a false dawn is, like Schaub’s sense of opposition, itself a revolutionary stance. Pynchon is providing a sense of undecidability that we don’t get in Vineland’s retelling of the era. In Lot 49, the revolution is equally likely to be a hallucination as it is to be real. Two decades later, Vineland suggests that faith in the notion that the 1960s were in fact revolutionary is one of the reasons the revolution failed. Pynchon portrays that faith as misplaced; it is used against the revolutionaries. Inherent Vice restores the focus to doubt about the nature of the revolution.

34Inherent Vice also adds an admonition to see the potential revolution through to its end, even though we cannot be sure it is real revolution we sense or only a hallucinatory hope for revolution. Doc worries, at one point, that he will lose his drug-induced insight into the way the human Internet is structured and become,

just one more diligent cop, going only where the leads pointed him, opaque to the light which seemed to be finding everybody else walking around in this regional dream of enlightenment, denied the wide-screen revelations Bigfoot called ‘hippiphanies,’ doomed instead to be accosted by freak after freak drawling, ‘Let me tell you about my trip, man,’ never to be up early enough for what might one day turn out to be a false dawn. (207)

35Pynchon has remade the revolution. It doesn’t matter if this enlightenment is only a false dawn; what matters is being there to see it. The novel’s conclusion drives this home.

36Doc, driving in an obscuring fog, becomes part of a spontaneous caravan of cars trying to make their way safely down the road. “It was one of the few things he’d ever seen anybody in this town, except hippies, do for free” (368). The hippie-like caravan is a spontaneous joining. Like the Lissajous figure in Lot 49, the caravan symbolizes the unifying principles of 1960s California. Pynchon suggests that technological advances will turn even this modest revolutionary collectivity into a commodity. Doc imagines that in the future,

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. . . to remember the night they set up a temporary commune to help each other home through the fog. (368)

37The proliferation of telecommunications and computer technology will not, he suspects, lead to a virtual unity like the Trystero, but instead will produce a pale imitation of revolution like the ones video technology produces in Vineland. Pynchon, however, concludes on a more hopeful, if ambivalent, note.

38Doc wonders what would happen if he ran out of gas and had to leave the caravan. He would “pull over on the shoulder, and wait. For whatever would happen. For a forgotten joint to materialize in his pocket. For the CHP to come by and choose not to hassle him. For a restless blonde in a Stingray to stop and offer him a ride. For the fog to burn away, and for something else this time, somehow, to be there instead” (369). This time Doc hopes it will be different, that the fog will lift and reveal a transformed landscape. Doc’s hopes for what will have changed when the fog of revolution lifts are unrealistic, even magical. From within the haze of the fog, though, the outcome of this cooperative caravan is unclear. Despite that ambiguity, Doc—and Pynchon—nevertheless must pursue the possibilities implied by the caravan until there is no more gas in the tank.

Bibliographie

Works Cited

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Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1966. New York: Harper, 1986.

Pynchon, Thomas. Vineland. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Pynchon, Thomas. Inherent Vice. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Schaub, Thomas H. Pynchon, the Voice of Ambiguity. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1981.

Stonehill, Brian. “Pynchon’s Prophecies of Cyberspace.” Pynchon Notes 34–35 (1994): 11–19.

Žižek, Slavoj. The Parallax View. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006.

Žižek, Slavoj. “The Cyberspace Real.” The European Graduate School. Web. 8 Oct. 2010.

Auteur

Fisher College, Boston

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