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The one thing that we yearn for in our living days, that makes us sigh and groan and undergo sweet nauseas of all kinds, is the remembrance of some lost bliss that was probably experienced in the womb and can only be reproduced (though we hate to admit it) in death. But who wants to die? Jack Kerouac ‘On the Road’

I decided to reread Jack Kerouac’s novel On The Road after comments on the Mapping the Zone podcast that Thomas Pynchon is more of a beat than a hippie.

Against the undeniable power of tradition, we were attracted by such centrifugal lures as Norman Mailer’s essay “The White Negro,” the wide availability of recorded jazz, and a book I still believe is one of the great American novels, On the Road, by Jack Kerouac.

Source: Slow Learner by Thomas Pynchon

I first read On the Road while I was ‘on the road’ around South-East Asia after finishing university.[1] I picked up what I am confident was knock-off copy. I remember aspects, but feel like I overlooked a lot. Ironically, I am not sure that it was the right book to read on the road, dipping in and out of. If anything, I wonder if I should probably have been writing my own book maybe?

The novel involves real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. Sal Paradise stands in for Kerouac. The book recounts several journeys across America, often with or following Dean Moriarty.

Reflecting upon the book now, what stood out to me is the picture of place and culture that the book provides as Sal travels around the country. It was interesting to compare this with Flannery O’Conner’s Wise Blood and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

I was also intrigued about the place of jazz music within the text and influence on the feel and flow of the text. Here I was left thinking about F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and Thomas Pynchon’s writing.

While the first-person perspective had me thinking about the unreliable narrator within The Great Gatsby, as well as Robert Pirsig’s own road journey in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

I think that what stands out with returning to a novel like On the Road is the impact of my own experiences within regards to books read and life lived. I listened to this book via Libby

Well, to be technical, I was on an Intrepid tour. ↩

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Compassion fatigue would be better termed a ‘failure of the imagination’ for what this numbness in the face of the intolerable suffering of others bespeaks is an inability to get a grip on the world situation today, as it really is. Cognitive maps are urgently needed to address this deficit. Ian Buchanan ‘Fredric Jameson: Live Theory’

Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan provides an introduction to the work of American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist, Fredric Jameson:

Ian Buchanan explores and illuminates how Jameson forms his concepts and how they operate, providing a fascinating account of Jameson’s important and ongoing contributions to Critical Theory. The book provides a clear sense of his overall project and the marvelous productivity of his thinking. Motivated by a desire to inaugurate social change by illuminating the obstacles standing in its way, the aim of Jameson’s work is to dishabituate us from the comfortable feeling that modern life is enhanced by the global grip of capitalism.

Source: Fredric Jameson: Live Theory by Ian Buchanan (Continuum – Bloomsbury)

The book starts with an exploration Jameson’s dialectical criticism. At the heart of this is the demystification of the present, and opening up of a space for thoughts of the future. It is a form of criticism that is unique as it critiques its own concepts and categories at the same time as it deploys them. Breaking away from the deconstructionists, Jameson creates a form of metacommentary that involves three arguments: (1) texts are already interpreted, (2) why then interpret, and (3) why is that one interpretation is more successful than another.

Buchanan then traces the origins of Jameson’s thinking and criticism through Jean-Paul Sartre’s battle between past and future, Theodor Adorno’s totalisation, Bertolt Brecht’s historical estrangement effect and Roland Barthes’ refunctioning of concepts.

With this foundation set, Buchanan then focuses his attention on unpacking two of Jameson’s seminal texts: The Political Unconscious and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.

For Jameson, The Political Unconscious differs from New Historicism in that it is committed to an object-centered point of view focused on production. This is all unpacked using a ‘multi-layered interpretive apparatus.’

The ‘political unconscious’ is a complex, multi-layered interpretive apparatus – it can now be seen to rest on the following four propositions: all cultural texts are political allegories; allegory is a cultural means of symbolically working through real social and cultural anxieties; only those texts which touch a nerve of genuine social and cultural concern will be interesting to us; and history is the ambivalent master code that enables us to decode the psychically and politically significant elements of a text.

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

Discussing Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Buchanan provides history of Jameson’s effort to capture the new cultural dominant, beginning with a reading of a paper ‘Postmodernism and Consumer Society’ in 1982, the publishing of an initial version in a book The Anti-Aesthetic in 1983, the publishing of fuller version in New Left Review in 1984, and then the definitive book length version in 1991. Buchanan identifies five principal symptoms of postmodernity in Jameson’s work:

  1. A new ‘depthlessness’ of the image (‘waning of affect’).
  2. A weakening of historicity (pastiche).
  3. A whole new type of emotional ground tone (‘hysterical sublime’).
  4. A new relation to technology (geopolitical aesthetic).
  5. A mutation in built space (cognitive mapping).

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

Buchanan then finishes his exploration of Jameson’s work with a discussion of the ideas of cognitive mapping and utopia as being the two concepts at the heart of so much of his work.

I came upon Ian Buchanan’s book while looking for secondary material after reading Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. One of the things that I enjoyed about Buchanan’s book was the way in which he placed Jameson’s texts in context. I also enjoyed the interview between Buchanan and Jameson at the end of the book, especially the question of how to teach and instruct:

IB: Your role as an intellectual is to teach and to instruct, so perhaps you can offer some advice on how to do this. FJ: Well, I guess I’m tempted to begin an answer to that question by repeating the Sartrean, Heideggerian, maybe even Lacanian idea that we’re never in the truth, we’re always in error, méconnaissance, various ideology, illusions of all kinds and that the truth is not a place that we can remain in, even though every so often we can have fitful glimpses of that truth and try to hold on to a moment of authenticity that’s con- stantly slipping away, imperilled on all sides, and necessarily condemned to disappear into ideology and reification. Human beings are always inauthentic but are occasionally capable of some moment of authen- ticity. I wanted to insist on the way in which a genuine dialectical thought really has that shock of repositioning ourselves for a brief moment in the truth or in authenticity, but only for a fitful moment. I’m not sure that this can be taught except by example – I don’t mean by my personal example, but by examples of moments in which all of a sudden we grasp this larger movement of the dialectic.

Source: Fredric Jameson Live Theory by Ian Buchanan

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Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil. Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in William James' The Varieties of Religious Experience

I decided to dive into Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland after reading an article by Devin Thomas O’Shea I stumbled upon in the Lithub newsletter. O’Shea suggests that Pynchon’s exploration of Ronald Reagan’s slashing of the federal government provided lessons for today as Donald Trump and DOGE cut back on spending.

Vineland is apt for our moment since the plot is set in motion by Reagan’s slashing of the federal government, unwittingly severing millions of connections, setting in motion events beyond anyone’s control, resurrecting the suppressed.

Source: Why Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland—a Disappointment When It Was Published—is the Novel We Need Right Now by Devin Thomas O’Shea

Therefore, after finding an audiobook version on Audible, I dived in.

I feel like ‘reading’ may not quite be the right verb when it comes to Thomas Pynchon or even listening to an audiobook. I feel that my failure with Pynchon is that I dive in looking for ‘fun’, but quickly bump into ’hard fun‘. Responding to the dangers of ‘getting through’, Alan Jacobs reflects upon these two modes of reading.

There are many valid reasons to read, but if you’re about self-improvement in one way or another — an increase in knowledge or insight or, hey, even wisdom — then one of the most reliable ways to become a better reader is to read fewer books but read them with greater care. If you would be wise, an essential book you know intimately — through slow reading or repeated reading — is of more use to you than a dozen lesser books that you know only casually.

But when you’re reading for fun, don’t worry about “getting more from a book.” Just do whatever you most enjoy.

Source: Getting Through by Alan Jacobs

I would love to sit down with the book and a pencil and read away, but fear I would never get anywhere that way, so I compromise with listening and annotating an ebook as I go.

I sometimes feel like listening can be akin to driving through a country town at 80km per hour. Yes you have been there and you can recall the main attractions, but it is not the same stopping and spending time walking the streets. To counter this, I listened to the Mapping the Zone podcast alongside listening to Vineland. The podcast focuses on a slow readings of Pynchon’s novels, one section at a time. Each episode breaks things down, exploring key ideas, quotes and Pynchon moments, something akin to literature circles.

I had previously ‘read’ .

Some critic Vineland for being overtly political and polemical, some for not taking itself seriously enough to be leftist literature. Always with so much going on, I wonder if Pynchon’s fiction can be considered what Roland Barthes’ described as ’writerly’ and always open to vastly divergent interpretations. As John Walters suggests in his review of Vineland:

I approach the novels of Thomas Pynchon with trepidation, knowing that I’m only going to comprehend and appreciate a portion of their mysteries and treasures.

Source: Book Review: Vineland by Thomas Pynchon by John Walters

In an attempt to untangle the various threads, Dan Geddes highlights five themes that run through Vineland:

  • Infiltrating resistance
  • State repression
  • The war on drugs and the erosion of liberties
  • The tube
  • Productive and non-productive work

Throughout, Geddes suggests that Pynchon creates a picture of where we are and where we are going:

Pynchon is a precise chronicler of 1980s America. In less than 400 pages, Pynchon connects situations from 1980s Northern California, and follows family links back to 1940s Southern California, covering the counterculture, federal law enforcement, the military, the film industry, and links it to the American and Japanese mafia, martial arts. Pynchon is at his very strongest in his historical flashbacks, where he can merge history with his own fabrications. He does it all believably, with rich detail, and with his patented style of humor, which is to describe precisely, and to bear merciless witness to violence and artificiality of the world. There is no more able fictional chronicler of where we are and where we are going.

Source: Pynchon’s Vineland: The War on Drugs and the Coming Police-State by Dan Geddes

Also alluding to the hear and now, Andrew Gordon argues that Vineland touches on the cultural contested terrain associated with the sixties. It provides a ‘countermyth to the official stories’.

According to the novelist E. L. Doctorow, “history is a kind of fiction in which we live and hope to survive, and fiction is a kind of speculative history, perhaps a superhistory” (“False Documents” 25). Vineland is such a superhistory; it provides a countermyth to pose against the official stories, writing our times more truly through the play of imagination. In all his fiction, Pynchon has helped to create and to recreate our history.

Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon by Andrew Gordon

Towards the end of the novel, Pynchon himself uses a quote from Emerson to capture this sense of recreating of history:

Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil.

Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted in William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience quoted in Vineland

I was intrigued with the argument that Vineland was described as ‘Pynchon-lite’. Although it is not Gravity’s Rainbow, it still offers so much. What feels different is the depth and breadth of characters. The comparison that came up again and again on the Mapping the Zone podcast was with David Lynch and movies like Blue Velvet and Lost Highway. There is always something deeper, darker, murkier, lying just beneath the surface. Things are never as they seem.

Along with the comparison between DOGE and Reaganomics, I was left reflecting upon the focus on the Tube addiction explored throughout the novel and was left thinking about the way in which the place of media has only increased with the advent of tablets, streaming platforms and social media. I feel that the current debates are not just a continuation, but an acceleration of the same anxieties that fueled Vineland.

In the end, I was left wondering what Pynchon would look like in an Australian context? And who are the Australian authors who best capture ‘where we are and where we are going’?