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Chapter 1: Assembling the Secret Agents
The chapter investigates the agency of nonhuman actors in Vineland by not only
approaching the novel from several directions, but by attending to its own investment in
directions: roads taken and not taken; the narrative strategies of streets, freeways, and
dead ends; the relationship between pathways and perceptions. This phenomenological
act of perceptually foregrounding nonhuman discursivity is one of dis- and/or re-
orientation, which functions to draw out the agency of the nonhuman world at work in
the novel. I argue that Pynchon proposes this work of re-orienteering as a strategy for
human survival in a world that is not “antihuman,” as Eddins claims (“Probing the Nihil”
170), so much as it is the stubborn, intrusive, surprising world of material contingencies
and causal complexities that comes, as Cary Wolfe puts it, “both before and after
humanism” (xv). Such an attention to re- and dis-orientation situates humans in terms of
the materiality of spatial determinants and, in so doing, “open[s] up how spatial
perceptions come to matter and be directed as matter” (Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
12). I attempt to draw this out by focusing on the large-scale nonhuman agential
assemblages that dominate the spaces of this novel, such as roads, cities, weather
patterns, and bioregions. I argue that Pynchon deploys and creates juxtapositions among
such authorial assemblages in order to map the ways in which these assemblages encode
narrative-discursive frameworks—their histories, their agendas, their phenomenological
imperatives—in and through the materialities of their being.
One of the most massively scaled examples of this in the novel occurs in a scene in
which Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates spend an afternoon at a motel in Oklahoma,
planning the overthrow of the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll as a cell of tornados
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moves in over the city. Madeline Ostrander is right to draw attention to the storm as an
important component of this scene. She suggests that it “symbolizes the forces Brock
represents…The storm image associates Vond with the dominant patriarchal structures of
oppression” (128), but while Ostrander is attentive to Pynchon’s treatment of the
nonhuman world, this interpretation relies on the assumption of a human-centric ontology
in which the world outside the motel reflects the turmoil within, and in which the drama
of masculinity remains a key index in understanding Pynchon’s political philosophy. In
other words, this approach applies what we know about power from Gravity’s Rainbow
to how it functions in Vineland. What happens, though, when we push the influence of
the storm on the scene even further, and foreground the drama outside the motel room?
Frenesi describes the storm as destabilizing her sense of being secure with Brock, “just
when she thought they were nestled safe in the center of America” (215). The aggressive
intrusion of the tornado outbreak into this scene, and the unambiguous evocation of a war
being waged as “the storm held the city down like prey, trying repeatedly to sting it into
paralysis” (216), define a landscape and skyscape that function to minimize the struggle
unfolding in the motel room, and to suggest that the real secret about power in the world
has little to do with the human categories of gender, desire, ambition, and control and
more to do with the massive nonhuman forces unfolding all around them. In the search
for alternate sources of power in this novel, the storm as “agent of rapture” (VL 212) is a
useful marker, suggesting that the secret agents at work here are not exclusively of the
federal variety.
As a bridge to the focus of Chapter 2, I conclude this chapter by introducing the
switchback narrative, an alternative to the linear narrative of the freeway system
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assemblage that is one of the avatars of capitalist infrastructural ideology in this novel.
This alternative narrative strategy is figured as a product of American radical politics in
the postwar 20
th
century, an aspect of that history which, despite its failures and
disappointments, has become coded into the landscape so that alternative strategies of
movement, perception, and navigation remain viable forms of resistance for human-
nonhuman assemblies that resist the discursive tyrannies of techno-capitalist state
fascism. While Vineland has been critiqued for being less labyrinthine than Pynchon’s
major novels—Joseph Tabbi calls it “too easily placeable in the field of current writing”
and “an imaginative shortcut on Pynchon’s part” (90), and Ken Knabb affirms that it “is
constructed like a large public square”—I argue that the novel’s central conceptual and
stylistic challenges can only be fully engaged by attending to the complexities of its
spaces, their coded narrative architectures, and the subtle nonhuman agencies at work
within, all of which are suggested by the following passage:
The arrangements of hillside levels, alleyways, corners, and rooftops created a
Casbah topography that was easy to get lost in quickly, terrain where the skills of
the bushwhacker became worth more than any resoluteness of character, an
architectural version of the uncertainty, the illusion, that must have overtaken his
career for him ever to’ve been assigned there in the first place. (VL 25)
In this scene Pynchon is describing Gordita Beach, and the career is not his own but
rather that of disgraced DEA Agent Hector Zuñiga. However, the references to the
“architectural version of the uncertainty, the illusion, that must have overtaken his
career” and the call for “the skills of the bushwacker” point both to Pynchon reliance on
the spatio-material as a site of narrative encoding, and to the ways in which Vineland
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