I’ve been thinking about America’s troubled identity as a youth culture and whether we might ever grow up. To be childlike isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Jesus exhorted his disciples to be like children. There is something admirably childlike in Socrates’ pursuit of wisdom through humility and relentless questioning. All of the most common qualities of childlike behavior are laudable: wonder, curiosity, trust. They are also contrary to childish behavior and its associations with selfishness, a refusal to take responsibility, and a need for constant attention.
One of the earliest stories of growing up is the Biblical story of the Garden of Eden. As children we live in innocence and paradise. We grow up by gaining knowledge: knowledge of good and evil, of sin and death. We enter what William Blake called the state of experience. For Blake, wisdom is gained by renewing the innocence that was lost to experience, except this is now an innocence not of ignorance but knowledge. Banishing ignorance requires a confrontation with the past and taking responsibility for our actions.
I’m reminded of a scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation where a man from present day Earth had been transported to Picard’s Enterprise. Struck by the man’s insolence Picard responds, “A lot has changed in the past three hundred years. People are no longer obsessed with the accumulation of things. We've eliminated hunger, want, the need for possessions. We've grown out of our infancy.” In the Star Trek universe, childlike curiosity is maintained, but alongside it a sense of responsibility to care for and treat with dignity all living things. These are the values Star Trek associates with a mature culture.
In regard to property and how it relates to responsibility, I.A. Richards is helpful. In his surprisingly deep book *How to Read a Page* he says that “Abundance is clearly not an unmixed blessing. When all HAVE more than anyone can use, we may have to count losses of a less tangible sort—as we can already see… If we were building a Utopia, we might perhaps rule that the young are to enjoy the use of a limited private property, and only when they have learned all that that can teach should they enter into possession of the commonwealth.” For Richards, property is primarily useful as a means of educating the young on how to be responsible. Once a young person has developed this sense of responsibility the possession of property is no longer necessary and can be set aside. The child has grown up and is now fit to enter the future utopian commonwealth.
Of course, while this is my view, it isn't everyone's. For an antithetical perspective one need only look to any number of American libertarians, from Ayn Rand to Charles Koch or Peter Thiel. I’m tempted to provide a fictional example, even if he is hardly more palatable: Grandison Whiting, from Thomas M. Disch’s powerful novel *On Wings of Song.* According to Disch’s character, “…all men are responsible for themselves, by definition. All adults, that is. Bums, however, insist on remaining children, in a state of absolute dependency. Think of the most incorrigible such wretch you’ve seen, and imagine him at the age of five instead of five-and-fifty. What change might you observe? There he is, smaller no doubt, but in moral terms the same spoiled child, whining over his miseries, wheedling to have his way, with no plans except for the next immediate gratification, which he will either bully us into giving him or, failing that, will attempt to seduce from us by the grandeur and misery of his abasement… To be a gentlemen is to get what you want with only an implicit threat of violence. America, by and large, has no gentlemen—only managers and criminals. Managers never assert themselves sufficiently, and are content to surrender their autonomy and most of the money they help to generate to us. In return they’re allowed the illusion of a guiltless life. Criminals, on the other hand, assert themselves too much and are killed by other criminals, or by us. As always, the middle way is best.”
It was with these thoughts that I recently read Thomas Pynchon’s 1990 novel, Vineland. I hesitate to say anything at all on Pynchon since each of his novels is such a dense labyrinth of ideas and references that whatever I write will almost certainly be so reductionist as to be hardly useful. Having started down this path of interpretation I feel I’ve invested too much to abandon it. I've pulled my strand through the maze. And at least for me, thinking about Vineland as it relates to questions of American juvenescence has helped clarify something of what I take the book to be up to.
Many of the principal characters of Vineland seem locked in a state of childhood. The novel opens in the ominous year of 1984 with child of the 60s Zoyd Wheeler, now on the dole, reduced to an annual carnivalesque performances to prove his worthiness for government support. Having briefly abandoned his daughter Prairie with his mother-in-law, Sasha, Zoyd is now doing what he can to make amends and maintain a modest home for himself and the now teenage Prairie. Likewise, his estranged ex-wife, Frenesi Gates, once a radical documentary film maker who betrayed her cause out of an infatuation with the fascist Brock Vond, is herself reduced to a second childhood. After being sent to a re-education camp by Vond, Frenesi's only job prospect is as an informant. Like her former prison mate turned partner Flash, the two are locked in perpetual childhood:
“One of Flash’s big sorrows was that once, not long ago, he’d been as outlaw as they come, grand theft auto, hard and dangerous drugs, small arms and dynamite and epic long hauls by the dark of the moon. But then he got caught, and his little teen wife left him, and the court took his babies away, and Flash was turned, left with no choice but to work his way up on their side of the law, soon finding that nobody trusted him enough to bring him all the way inside any structure of governance. So there he had to hang, on the outside, part of the decoration, clinging with all the others he ran or was run by, gargoyles living on a sheer vertical façade. He knew they would only let him go where nothing would be damaged if he should turn again. It would mean twenty- or thirty-year orbit around the lurid planet of adolescence—an entire adult career to be spent as a teenager under surveillance, none of whose “family” would ever believe in him.”
The fascist Vond is convinced that this state of perpetual childhood is what the 60s radicals actually want. Like Grandison Whiting, Vond believes they desire to live in a debased state of adolescence: “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—if he’d allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching—need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family. The hunch he was betting on was that these kid rebels, being halfway there already, would be easy to turn and cheap to develop. They’d only been listening to the wrong music, breathing the wrong smoke, admiring the wrong personalities. They needed some reconditioning.”
Vond will ultimately fail in his mission, being swept away magically at the novel’s close to the land of the dead. Such fantasies are hardly comforting given our current moment. Even if Vond is dispatched, the Gate's family curse, the lust for fascism, endures. Still, the novel does provide an antithesis to Vond’s philosophizing and fittingly it is another Eden story:
“Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam – it was the Serpent.”
“It was sleazy, slippery man who invented ‘good’ and 'evil,’ where before women had been content to just be. In among the other confidence games they were running on women at the time, men also convinced us that we were the natural administrators of this thing 'morality’ they’d just invented. The dragged us all down into this wreck they’d made of the Creation, all subdivided and labeled, handed us the keys to the church, and headed off toward the dance halls and the honky-tonk saloons.”
Should we trust the rather passive moral of this fable? Alternative moralities, perhaps complimentary, will be presented later. What the fable does provide is the general structure of the book. Frenesi, as Eve, had betrayed her partner, Lilith, aka Darryl Louise or DL Chastain for the serpent Vond. Lilith has her own storyline though. Pynchon sets up a parallel between the Frenesi-Vond plot with DL as a less passionate and more logic driven alternative to Frenesi. Likewise, DL's reluctant lover Takeshi is a complete inversion of Vond. Ironically, while DL is a cold pragmatist, her storyline is filled with the fantastic: Godzilla, ninja enclaves complete with death touches, Karmic adjusters, and a Puncutron Machine (whatever that is). Frenesi does not really grow up, but Prairie, taken under the wing of DL, does. Or so we hope. When it counts, Prairie is able to fight off the family curse--a lust for men in uniform--and in the moment of truth finds the perfect insult to turn away Vond, something her mother Frenesi was unable to do during her first encounter with the federal agent. The novel suggests that we should consider change as it occurs over time and by recognizing these patterns of weakness we may be able to avert them. More importantly, where change occurs is through caring for others. Zoyd, for all his faults, matures when he decides to take responsibility for his daughter Prairie:
“After a while Zoyd was allowed into the Traverse-Becker annual reunions, as long as he brought Prairie, who at about the age of three or four got sick one Vineland winter, and looked up at him with dull hot eyes, snot crusted on her face, hair in a snarl, and croaked, “Dad? Am I ever gonna get bett-or?” pronouncing it like Mr. Spock, and he had his belated moment of welcome to the planet Earth, in which he knew, dismayingly, that he would, would have to, do anything to keep this dear small life from harm, up to and including Brock Vond, a possibility he wasn’t too happy with. But as he watched her then, year by year, among these reunion faces her own was growing more and more to look like, continuing to feel no least premonitory sign of governmental interest from over the horizon beyond the mental-disability checks that arrived faithfully as the moon, he at last began, even out scuffling every day, to relax some, to understand that this had been the place to bring her and himself after all, that for the few years anyway, he must have chosen right for a change, that time they’d come through the slides and storms to put in here, to harbor in Vineland, Vineland the Good.”
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