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This spatial contest, seemingly decided by the hegemony of the grid, can be reformulated
by focusing on the secluded pot-growing community of Holytail, to which Zoyd Wheeler
flees from the attentions of federal authorities. Since it is situated, “between the coastal
ranges and yearlong fogs, […] access [to Holytail], at least by road, wasn’t easy—
because of the Great Slide of ’64, you had to double back and forth along both sides of
the river and take ferries, which weren’t always running, and bridges said to be haunted”
(220). From the ground, at least, multiple resistant actors make Holytail a safe haven. Its
positioning in a valley, “between the coastal ranges,” and its permanent, “yearlong”
shrouding of fog signal a community that is protected by a concealing ecology. Similarly,
“the Great Slide of ’64,” likely a reference to the flooding that devastated many areas of
Northern California in the winter of 1964,
5
evokes the aleatory nature of weather
“patterns” and the resistance of certain topographies to systematized absorption by the
military-industrial complex.
The routes of access to Holytail schematize such resistance as not only physical,
but physically encoded into the landscape, both by the history of its use and by its own
counter-history. Access is dependent on “ferries, which weren’t always running”—in
other words, on a system of exchange uninterested in the stable accumulation of capital—
and on “bridges said to be haunted,” a reference to the “realm behind the immediate”
(186) that pervades Vineland County. The haunting of these bridges can be understood as
a kind of nonhuman inscription that destabilizes the human actor as the sole locus of the
5
“The Great Slide of ‘64” may refer either to the 1964 Alaska earthquake that triggered a tsunami in March
of that year, “completely devastating several North Coast towns and resulting in 14 deaths,” or to the
flooding that occurred in December, when torrential downpours caused water levels to rise dramatically in
North Coast rivers and streams and “34 California counties were declared disaster areas” (“Floods in
California”).
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historiographical act. If, as Mike Davis suggests in his work on the Southern California
landscape, “disaster amnesia is a federally subsidized luxury” there (47), then the
landscape surrounding Holytail signifies this axiom’s obverse: where no federal subsidy
sweeps down to restore order, a kind of nonhuman memory, encoded into the materiality
of the assemblage, rules.
One of the most closely treated examples of this alternate nonhuman history in
Vineland is “the ruins of the old WPA bridge” (187), connecting the City of Vineland to
the Shade Creek Thanatoid Village. Destroyed in 1964, the bridge is nonetheless still
passable, although “detours were always necessary, often with the directions crudely
spray-painted onto pieces of wall or old plywood shuttering” (187). In 1984, Pynchon
writes, the bridge is in a state of attempted reconstruction that has been going on,
nonstop, for the past twenty years, “always crews at work, around the clock” (187). The
labor of development is constant here, because the creek below, and the river that feeds
it, are always doing their work of erosive disassembly: “sometimes entire segments
vanished overnight, as if floated away downriver on pontoons” (187). This passage sets
up the simultaneous presence of multiple histories, haunting the assemblage though their
materially encoded persistence: the bridge, the work of the WPA, is the inscription of the
civic optimism of 1930s pre-war “New Deal earnestness” (317) on a municipally
marginal area. In its decay, the bridge encodes both the disastrous failure of the 1960s to
revitalize the political energies at work in those pre-war years of Wobbly leftism, and the
state’s failure to control or maintain the infrastructure it develops. Whispering between
these two decades, of course, is the unsignifiable backdrop of world warfare, which takes
on a haunting presence-by-way-of-absence here as the discursive gap to which all the
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novel’s late-twentieth century failures and betrayals can be traced. The result, in 1984, is
a contested space in which efforts to salvage (on the part of the state) and to find
navigational strategies (on the part of the counterculture) become a perpetual cycle of
repetition without difference in a resistant nonhuman world that haunts human travelers
both in its encoding of ruin and in its assertion of a bioregional agency that refuses to
privilege an exclusively human historical narrative.
Seeking routes by which to navigate this nonhuman terrain, travelers wait on the
bridge while “a truck piled high with smashed concrete and corroded iron rod went
grinding back and forth by its own routes of beaten earth” (187). This image of truck-
beaten earth is not the only one of its kind in the novel. It functions as another of
Pynchon’s spatial codes. Jeff Severs writes that Pynchon’s compacted earth evokes “the
well-beaten paths of a paved nation,” engraving and instantiating in the landscape the
narratives of “a kind of everyday fascism, warring on nature” (225). As Severs’s phrasing
suggests, the other side of this war, the other assemblage in competition over this
landscape, is the Northern California bioregion, its watershed a complex assemblage in
its own right, resisting the imposition of fascist infrastructure and insisting, through its
own discursive command lines, on an authorial role in the inscription of these beaten
paths. Ahmed points to the circularity of this authorship: “we walk on the path as it is
before us,” she writes, “but it is only before us as an effect of being walked upon. A
paradox of the footprint emerges. Lines are both created by being followed and are
followed by being created” (16). I would add that this “paradox” becomes less
mysterious, less haunted by its circularity, when we add to the equation the other agents
involved in the creation of these paths.
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