Through an inquiry into the meanings of the neologism of disease names in Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland, this paper tries to locate the postmodern novel as a fruitful “failure” that demonstrates a crucial aspect of today’s left-wing politics: the inability of New-Left thinking to criticize the shift of welfare-state liberalism to neoliberalism, where, as argued by such scholars as David Harvey, Pierre Bourdieu and Nikolas Rose, the New-Left agenda even seems to encourage neoliberalization. From this perspective, Vineland, a narrative that depicts the life in 1984 of an aged hippie under the Reagan administration, is to be seen as a comic attempt to shed light on how postmodernism cuts itself off from the reality of politics.
The politics of identity, or biopolitics, governs the retrospective narrative that constitutes the novel’s main body. The biopolitical mode is analyzed as consisting of two important tactics of postmodern fiction: the deconstructive politics of parody, which commits to fluidity of identities, and the displacement of history by memory, which virtually defines the past as something to be reexperienced. We briefly trace in the paper how biopolitics, or, as Michel Foucault defines, a form of political rationality that finds the notion of population as its object, results today in these postmodern politics of identity and experience.
The theories of the politics of parody had their heyday in the early 90s, as is shown by such books as Linda Hutcheon’s The Politics of Postmodernism and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble together with the general acceptance of Jacques Derrida’s advocate of deconstruction as the postmodern politics of resistance. The novel’s opening episode, the old hippie’s successful fraud to get a government check for the mentally ill, symbolizes the postmodern politics, where resistance to the System takes the form of the complicity in it. On the other hand, the 90s are also seen as the time when critical theories and contemporary cultural works were both interested in re-living the past in such forms as New Historicism, Trauma Theory and the conception of what could be called postmodern ghost, as exemplified by Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the popular film Ghost. The novel’s body of the retrospective narrative saliently demonstrates the desire to experience, rather than represent, the past, making the fragmented text something like a labyrinth of jumbled chronicles.
The novel grows into something comic because all the important plots in it are abruptly worked out by president Reagan’s whimsical decision to use the budget ax, an exercise of Reaganomics. In other words, the text ultimately shows that everything politically important is fundamentally decided by the process of neoliberalization, but, at the same time, that the novel is unable to deal with it in any significant way. This is because the postmodern tactics that decide the form of the text concern the biopolitical realm of identity and recognition, detaching itself from the political hard fact of the economic policy; they are biopolitical instead of being political.
The structure of the novel, all in all, basically follows Fredric Jameson’s critical definition of postmodernism when its autonomy is gained at the cost of the suppression of the economic. This is why the novel should be seen as a failure; yet, it also would not be far-fetched to see in the comic extravaganza the absurdity not of the novel, but of Reaganomics.
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