Daniel R. White

University of Central Florida
<fdwhite@ucf1vm>

 

Images are more real than anyone could have supposed. And just because they are an unlimited resource, one that cannot be exhausted by consumerist waste, there is all the more reason to apply the conservationist remedy. If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.

 

–Susan Sontag, On Photography (180)

 

Renaissance humanist Giordano Bruno argued in the persona of the god Momus that “the gods have given intellect and hands to man and have made him similar to them, giving him power over other animals. This consists in his being able not only to operate according to his nature and to what is usual, but also to operate outside the laws of nature, in order that by forming or being able to form other natures, other paths, other categories, with his intelligence, by means of that liberty without which he would not have the above-mentioned similarity, he would succeed in preserving himself as god of the earth” (205). It was in the spirit of this quest to become “god of the earth” that the Father of Francis Bacon’s utopian Salomon’s house explains, “The end of our foundation is the knowledge of causes, and the secret motions of things; and the enlarging of the bounds of the human empire, to the effecting of all things possible” New Atlantis 210). The epistemology of the new human empire was to be founded on a combination of Cartesian rationality seated in the individual human reason–the cogito–and Baconian empiricism. The cogito is the unit of mind, the subject, which endeavors to understand and control the supposedly material and mechanistic realm of nature. But is this definition of mind correct and is the Modern project stemming from the Renaissance–for the technological domination of nature–taking us where we want to go? The modernist project has been challenged by two important bodies of theory, which I have elsewhere argued (White 1991) are intrinsically related: postmodernity and ecology. Here I intend to argue that there is a new, literary contender.

 

The literary challenge to the modernist view of man and nature comes in the form of what I would like to define as a new genre: literary ecology.¹ It is a species, or perhaps I should say with Deleuze and Guattari a rhizomic offshoot, of that broad critique of modernism known as postmodernity. (Postmodern-“ism” sounds hopelessly modernist.) It is a “literature” that fundamentally undermines the premises of modernity at their foundation– the subject of power–and by implication would tumble the entire domain circumscribed by the Enlightened entrepreneur of the West. It is a literature of guerilla warfare amidst the Thousand Plateaus of the ecological mind, whose textual strategies, like those of the Viet Cong, threaten at least the self-image, the simulacrum, of the great American technological utopia, the one which is reflected in Baudrillard’s sunglasses at Disney World. Thomas Pynchon probably defines the genre best by his work in Vineland, just as he exemplified postmodernity in Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) after which the sensitive “reader” gleaned, if she or he were still sufficiently undecentered to navigate, with Pynchon’s imago of Dorothy: “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more . . . ” (279). Now with Vineland and Thomas Sanchez’s Mile Zero, another originary work in the genre, we are entering a new post. WHAT IS LITERARY ECOLOGY?

 

Literary ecological theory stands, like Pynchon’s work itself according to some critics, with one foot on traditional metaphysical ground and one in the postmodern void.² What is traditional in literary ecology is the acceptance of a value hierarchy, namely the Great Chain of Being, stemming from the classical and medieval worlds. The most salient feature of the Chain for the human condition, Dwight Eddins argues following Eric Voegelin, is that it represents a metaxic tension between spiritual order and material chaos:

 

                             Divine--Nous
                            Psyche--Noetic
                           Psyche--Passions
                             Animal Nature
                           Vegetative Nature
                    Apeiron--Depth [the limitless]

 

The Divine Nous represents the upper limit of the human quest for spiritual fulfillment, not attainable in the flesh but a necessary eschaton or goal for human striving. “The substitution of a finite, purely ‘human’ eschaton for the infinitely receding nousmeans the negation of the spiritual (noetic) quest that produces the real order of the human,” Eddins explains. “The metaxic tension collapses, and man is pulled by apeirontic vectors through lower and lower levels of his being . . . ” (22). The Gnostic quest is to appropriate the Nous to attain the all-too-human goals of power and control, on the part of an elite–THEM in Pynchon–possessed of Gnosis, over lower orders of being, the Preterite–US. The quest to become a noetic power elite sets up a paranoid cycle of oppression:

 

For the gnostic elite . . . the alien world is a thing to be "overcome" . . . the elite experience, ironically, a preterite paranoia that drives them to seek mastery through their elite gnosis; but in so doing they define a new preterite in those who are not privy to this plexus of knowledge and power, but are pawns to be manipulated in its service. This preterity, in turn, can escape preterition only by adopting the power techniques of their masters; but in the very act they naturally tend to become--in Wordsworth's phrase--"Oppressors in their turn." (23)

 

Eddins’ discussion is too early to have included Vineland, but what better description of the relationship between its oppressor and oppressed, Brock Vond and Frenesi Gates, and their victims?

 

What is new in literary ecology’s appropriation of the old paradigm is that this description of the traditional hierarchy and its demise is also employed, even while it foregrounds human beings and their immediate concerns, as a paradigmatic description of an ecological crisis: of what communication theorist Anthony Wilden, commenting on the emerging Cartesian and Lockean ideas of the individual, calls “splitting the ecosystem”³:

 

One of the truly representative characteristics of the Lockean individual, as of the Cartesian one, is that it replicates in its own organization that SPLITTING OF THE ECOSYSTEM . . . with which the Age of Discovery opened the world to colonialism and to the specifically modern domination of nature. . . . It is a splitting of the subject in this world in which the supposedly dominant part--mind--not only 'controls' the rest (it is believed)--i.e., the body--but mind actually OWNS the body. (xli)

 

Capitalism, Wilden argues, splits the ecosystem not only by bifurcating the individual into mind and body, the one controller and the other to be controlled, but also by dividing society into bourgeoisie and proletariat, the modern social and economic form of owner and owned. Furthermore, Wilden argues, the traditional hierarchic relation between “nature” and “culture” or “nature” and “society” is as follows:

 

                         Land (Photosynthesis)
                  Labor Potential (Creative Capacity)
                               Capital.
     Land precedes and makes possible labor potential which
     precedes and makes possible the extraction of capital.  But
     capitalism through "commoditization" inverts the hierarchy:
                                Capital
                            Labor Potential
                             Land. (xxxv)

 

Capital is used to control labor potential which is used to exploit land. Underlying this system is the entrepreneurial persona, the new “god of the earth” envisioned by Bruno, and perhaps even more vividly by Francis Bacon: “I am come in very truth leading Nature to you, with all her children, to bind her to your service and to make her your slave . . . . So may I succeed in my only earthly wish, namely to stretch the deplorably narrow limits of man’s dominion over the universe to their promised bounds . . . ” (from The Masculine Birth of Time, or the Great Instauration of the Domination of Man over the Universe [1603], cited in Wilden xxxv-xxxvi). Nature is, of course, female and her children are the proletariat, the third world, whatever can be bought. Luckily, preterite like St. Cloud in Mile Zero and Zoyd in Vineland stubbornly resist: thus the socialist ecological stance of literary ecologists, evident both in Pynchon and Sanchez.

 

The gnostic, entrepreneurial splitting of the hierarchy of being also breaks down the metaxy, in ecological terms the dynamic equilibrium, of the Great Chain. In cybernetic language ecosystems may be viewed as hierarchies, or heterarchies, which exhibit tendencies toward both homeostasis and runaway. As Gregory Bateson explains,

 

All biological and evolving systems (i.e., individual organisms, animal and human societies, ecosystems, and the like) consist of complex cybernetic networks, and all such systems share certain formal characteristics. Each system contains subsystems which are potentially regenerative, i.e., which would go into exponential "runaway" if uncorrected. (Examples of such regenerative components are Malthusian characteristics of population, schismogenic changes of personal interaction, armaments races, etc.). (447)

 

Consider population, for example. Prey, unconstrained by traditional predators, will increase in population until limited by some other factor, perhaps disastrously by overpopulation which can decimate the population. So too, if man sprinkles his produce with DDT and kills off the bird population, the insects which were the original target of the poison will increase all the more rapidly unconstrained by their original predator and have to be “exterminated” by more toxin.

 

This kind of degenerative cycle is what Eddins calls, in language which echoes cybernetics, “modes of slippage inherent in the noetic distortions of gnosticism [which] are peculiarly relevant to the metaphysical force fields of Pynchon’s cosmos: the instability of the elite-preterite dichotomy and the distinction between secular and religious constructs” (23). In other words, Brock and Frenesi and those that he, then she, betrays are caught in the logic of ecological runaway, what Joseph Slade Thomas Pynchon 125) has called “excluded middles and bad shit” in reference to the plight of Oedipa Maas in The Crying of Lot 49: under the Reagan-Bush version of the Entrepreneurial New World Order, you must either become a pawn of the new gnostic elite or sink more deeply into preterition. And if you want to fight back, you must also become like the gnostic elite: you must split the mental/cultural/social/natural ecosystem for the sake of power, to switch roles from Oppressed to Oppressor so that the original split in the human ecology escalates in what Bateson called the Romano-Palestinian System.⁴ This is the koan with which many of Pynchon’s worthy characters are presented.

 

What is postmodern in literary ecology is that its strategy for escaping from the impossible polarities of the koan is to step out of the traditional ego of the West and into an expanded and more fluid definition of “mind.” This new definition of mind, explicit in the texts of Bateson, is what in effect gives literary ecology its deep-ecological dimension.

 

Bateson developed mental ecology in part as a critique both of Darwin and of the premises of the Western episteme mentioned at the outset. His argument is that if we accept the cybernetic theory of “self-correctiveness as the criterion of thought,” and the information-theoretical notion that an idea is definable as a “difference,” then these criteria are not limited to the human individual. Consider a man with a computer, Bateson argues.

 

What "thinks" and engages in "trial and error" is the man plus the computer plus the environment. And the lines between man, computer and environment are purely artificial, fictitious lines. They are lines across the pathways along which information or difference is transmitted. (491)

 

The result of this critique is a fundamental redefinition of the unit of mind:

 

If, now, we correct the Darwinian unit of survival to include the environment and the interaction between organism and environment, a very strange and surprising identity emerges: the unit of evolutionary survival turns out to be identical with the unit of mind. (491)

 

If this is true, Bateson concludes, then we are faced with a number of important changes in our thinking, especially in ethics. It means, for instance, that mind–the Nous of the Great Chain–becomes immanent in the entire ecological and evolutionary structure (466)⁵ and that, “Ecology, in the widest sense, turns out to be the study of the interaction and survival of ideas and programs (i.e. differences, complexes of differences, etc.) in circuits” (491).⁶ It also turns out that epistemological error is ecological error:

 

When you narrow down your epistemology and act on the premise "What interests me is me, or my organization, or my species," you chop off consideration of other loops of the loop structure. You decide that you want to get rid of the by-products of human life and that Lake Erie will be a good place to put them. You forget that Lake Erie is part of your wider eco-mental system--and that if Lake Erie is driven insane, its insanity is incorporated in the larger system of your thought and experience. (492)

 

In other words epistemological and ecological error are identical with the modernist paradigm and its industrial project. The literary-ecological correction of the error in Vineland is arguably an extension of what Eddins calls “Orphic Naturalism” in Gravity’s Rainbow: “a counterreligion to the worship of mechanism, power, and– ultimately–death” (5).

 

Plumwood (1991) criticizes deep ecology from an ecofeminist perspective in terms reminiscent of those I have used to characterize the literary ecological attack on the Cartesian cogito. She argues that

 

In inferiorizing such particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments [e.g. those emphasized by Pynchon and Sanchez], deep ecology gives us another variant on the superiority of reason and the inferiority of its contrasts, failing to grasp yet again the role of reason and incompletely critiquing its influence . . . . we must move toward the sort of ethics feminist theory has suggested, which can allow for both continuity and difference and for ties to nature which are expressive of the rich, caring relationships of kinship and friendship rather than increasing abstraction and detachment from relationship. (16)

 

Literary ecology arguably provides exactly this rich sense of connectedness and particularity, as the texts discussed below suggest.

 

Bateson’s language reveals the instrumental bias of Western science, as he describes nature in terms of a computer metaphor involving “circuits,” “units” and “system.” Yet he suggests what is fundamental to a more viable, ecological philosophy based on a genuine recognition and respect for the ecological other: the attribution of mind to nature. As Plumwood argues, “Humans have both biological and mental characteristics, but the mental rather than the biological have been taken to be characteristic of the human and to give what is ‘fully and authentically’ human. The term ‘human’ is, of course, not merely descriptive but very much an evaluative term setting out an ideal: it is what is essential or worthwhile in the human that excludes the natural” (17). This attribution of “mind” to “man” and materiality to “nature,” characteristic of the Cartesian dualism of res cogitans as the human cogito and res extensa as the objective world, and further expressed in the masculine subject of power dominating “mother” nature, as it is in the entrepreneurial persona who owns the world as his “real estate,” is arguably one of the principal targets of the literary ecological critique. Thus literary ecology embodies a synthesis of ecosocialist, deep ecological and ecofeminist concerns, but approaches them in terms of a postmodern ecological rubric which steps past the traditional either-or of the Oppressor and Oppressed, Elite and Preterite, Sacred and Secular, as deftly as Pynchon’s Ninjette DL (Darryl Louise Chastain) slips past Brock Vond’s guards.

 

The Origins of Literary Ecology⁷

 

“The Age of Ecology began on the desert outside Alamogordo, New Mexico on July 16, 1945, with a dazzling fireball of light and a swelling mushroom cloud of radioactive gasses,” argues Donald Worster in Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. The genesis of literary ecology is part of the larger history of ecological ideas, and will require a separate discussion. Here let me at least make of few suggestions about its origins. The Ecological idea stems from the 18th century, as Worster has demonstrated, but it rose into popular consciousness startled by the perception, evoked by the Bomb, that nature itself is vulnerable like the frail human beings within it. Worster continues, “As that first nuclear fission bomb went off and the color of the early morning sky changed abruptly from pale blue to blinding white, physicist and project leader J. Robert Oppenheimer felt at first a surge of elated reverence; then a somber phrase from the Bhagavad-Gita flashed into his mind: ‘I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds'” (339). Popular ecology, as Worster also demonstrates, has roots in Romanticism and, indeed, the intuition of the Romantic writers formed the basis upon which the clearer outlines of ecological science would be patterned. As Goethe wrote, in the character of Young Werther,

 

When the mists in my beloved valley steam all around me; when the sun rests on the surface of the impenetrable depths of my forest at noon and only single rays steal into the inner sanctum; when I lie in the tall grass beside a rushing brook and become aware of the remarkable diversity of a thousand little growing things on the ground, with all their peculiarities; when I can feel the teeming of a minute world amid the blades of grass and the innumerable, unfathomable shapes of worm and insect closer to my heart . . . ah, my dear friend . . . but I am ruined by it. I succumb to its magnificence. (24)

 

This is not unlike the feeling which drew the “flower children” back to nature in the 1960’s, articulated and sustained in the writings of Edward Abbey and Annie Dillard. Romantic writing was in direct response to the urbanization and mechanization of life effected by the Industrial Revolution, just as popular ecology is largely a response to what Mumford called the Megamachine of modern technology, economy, society and polity which has destroyed and displaced much of the human lifeworld, of “Earth House Hold” in the words of poet Gary Snyder. An incipient ecological sensibility is also evident in the “persistent modernist nostalgia for vanished axiological foundations in the midst of vividly experienced anomie” which Eddins finds in the work of Pynchon and is perhaps most vividly expressed, virtually in ecological dimension, by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land. Here images of a fouled, poisoned environment merge with those of human spiritual and physical demise–

 

                             Unreal City,
                 Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
              A Crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
              I had not thought death had undone so many.

               A rat crept softly through the vegetation
                 Dragging its slimy belly on the bank
                 While I was fishing in the dull canal

                           The river sweats
                           Oil and tar . . .

 

–amidst a culture which is shattered but whose very shards inspire hope of renewal: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.” Additionally, the fusion of human imagination with nature’s images, as well as the adamant leftist politics, characteristic of Magical Realism, for example in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch, is arguably an important forebear, and Carlos Fuentes’ recent Christopher Unborn I might well have included with Mile Zero and Vineland as an example of literary ecology, except for its problematic representation of gender. African literature is also a likely ancestor of the genre, for example Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart where the fragmentation of tribal society under the impact of European colonialism is explored, as it is in American literature by Peter Matthiessen, with regard to South American Indians, in another likely progenitor, At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Doris Lessing’s Briefing for a Descent into Hell presents a profound fusion of the human mind with nature’s, as her Golden Notebook reflects on feminist and socialist alternatives, both dimensions of which come together and are uplifted and transformed (Aufhebung) in her Canopus in Argos: Archives, especially Shikasta. Vonnegut’s Breakfast of Champions and Galapagos should not be overlooked in the search for LitEcol ancestors and, particularly where Pynchon is concerned, I would look up from these printed artifacts and seriously review the adventures of Tweety and Sylvester Vineland22).

 

More broadly, however, I suggest that the genealogy of literary ecology includes photography, film, painting, architecture and other arts, especially video, as well as the sciences, especially information theory and cybernetics. I suggest that this is true because literary ecology is a new communicational form, a new language practice, which has evolved or leapt into being through the postmodern “trialectic” of ecology, neomarxism, and feminism in the context of what Mark Poster has defined as The Mode of Information. Going beyond Marshall McLuhan’s axiom that “the medium is the message,” which he argues is based on Locke’s “‘sensorium’ of the receiving subject,” Poster contends,

 

What the mode of information puts in question, however, is not simply the sensory apparatus but the very shape of subjectivity: its relation to the world of objects, its perspective on that world, its location in that world. We are confronted not so much by a change from a "hot" to a "cool" communications medium, or by a reshuffling of the sensoria, as McLuhan thought, but by a generalized destabilization of the subject. (15)

 

In this new mode the modernist Cartesian rationalist subject, as well as his empiricist Lockean conterpart, is, like Tyrone Slothrop, dispersed into more dynamic, nomadic kind of mind, the very one animating literary ecology. As Poster continues,

 

In the mode of information the subject is no longer located in a point in absolute time/space, enjoying a physical, fixed vantage point from which rationally to calculate its options. Instead it is multiplied by databases, dispersed by computer messaging and conferencing, decontextualized and redefined by TV ads, dissolved and materialized continuously in the electronic transmission of symbols. In the perspective of Deleuze and Guattari, we are being changed from "arborial" beings, rooted in time and space, to "rhizomic" nomads who daily wander at will (whose will remains a question) across the globe . . . . (15)

 

Literary Ecology in Mile Zero & Vineland

 

Postmodern, as Charles Jencks defines it in relation to architecture but with clear ramifications for the other arts, refers to

 

double coding: the combination of Modern techniques with something else (usually traditional building) in order for architecture to communicate with the public and a concerned minority, usually other architects. (14, Jencks' emphasis)

 

Certainly Gravity’s Rainbow is at least doubly coded, employing multiple genres and styles, tragedy and comedy, narrative and song, even a character Tyrone Slothrop who does not win or lose or live or die in the end but is, like the subject of the mode of information, dispersed; a plot which is superimposed on the trajectory of a V2 rocket; chapter headings which are fitted with (pictures of) sprocket holes; and a closing apocalyptic poem over which we, suddenly transformed from solitary readers to a crowd of movie-goers, are supposed to envision a bouncing ball.

 

Literary ecologists, as postmodernists, use traditional literary forms in new ways. Both Sanchez and Pynchon employ regional realism, for instance, through their sense of place particularizing and enriching their larger ecological sensibility. Sanchez focuses on the rich biotic and human community of Key West and the Caribbean; his book is peopled with human folkways and natural life forms which are depicted sympathetically and in careful detail. The invaders from the North are also present, the focus of Sanchez’s historical, social, cultural and ultimately ecological critique. “It is about water,” his novel begins:

 

It was about water in the beginning, it will be in the end. The ocean mothered us all. Water and darkness awaiting light. Night gives birth. An inkling of life over distant sea swells toward brilliance. Dawn emerges from Africa, strikes light between worlds, over misting mountains of Haiti, beyond the Great Bahama Bank, touching cane fields of Cuba, across the Tropic of Cancer to the sleeping island of Key West, farther to the Gold Coast of Florida, its great wall of condominiums demarcating mainland America. (3)

 

Characterization is also given significant human- ecological dimension. Consider Sanchez’s representation of Justo–the African-Cuban cop who is Sanchez’s best candidate for heroism–typical of the literary-ecological concern not only with nature but also with human history and genealogy. Like Pynchon in Vineland, Sanchez gives his character dimension by tracing his connections over the generations of an extended family. This family connects Justo, not only socially, but also politically, with the oppressed, and ecologically, with the environment which has meant their livelihood. As Justo makes his way down Olivia street in Key West, the sight of a vanished Cuban groceria prompts him to reminisce about his boyhood, his grandfather, Abuelo, and grandmother Pearl, and her father: “Pearl’s father was an Ibu, brought to the Bahamas as a boy in chains from West Africa and freed fifteen years later in 1838 by the British. Freed by the very ones who had enslaved him, given a dowry of no money and a new name in a white man’s world, John Coe” (69). Sanchez characterizes Coe in part by his livelihood:

 

John Coe became a student of the sea when freed. The sea became John's new master. Turtles attracted him first, their gliding nonchalance, so few flipper strokes needed to navigate through a watery universe, an economy of effort worth emulating, which bespoke ancient liberation from the here and now. John felt kinship with his marine creature's abiding sense of ease, its deep breadth of freedom. John was as simple man who knew not the turtle's source of symbolic power, he understood only the animal's daily inspiration. John learned the ways of the thousand-pound leatherback and loggerhead turtles . . . . He studied eight- hundred-fifty-pound gentle greens . . . . He gained respect for the small fifty-pound hawksbill . . . . (69)

 

Coe’s sense of loving “familiarity,” in the original sense of this term, with the sea and its creatures overlaps with his love and respect for his wife, Brenda Bee. John chances upon her as she is being sold at a slave auction. When “The Well-dressed gentlemen in the crowd from Charleston and Mobile didn’t see anything of value in Brenda” because she is ill and half starved, “John Coe bought himself a wife in a town where a man of dark skin was not allowed to walk the streets after the nine-thirty ringing of the night bell, unless he bore a pass from his owner or employer, or was accompanied by a white person” (74). And he plays the role of healer and nurturer for her:

 

As John bathed Brenda's bony body with the humped softness of his favorite sheepswool sponge he vowed to treat this woman with kindness, drive the unspeakable terror from her eyes. John spoke to Brenda in a tongue she could understand, touched her only in a healing way. John brought Brenda red cotton dresses, strolled with her hand in hand on saturday eves down the rutted dirt length of Crawfish Alley, stopping to tip his cap to folks cooling themselves on the front wooden steps of their shacks. John planted a papaya tree behind his shack and a mango in front, for on sundays the preacher man swayed in the stone church before the congregation tall as an eluthera palm in a high wind, shouting his clear message that the Bible teaches to plant the fruiting tree. (74)

 

The “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” which Plumwood (above) argues are “inferiorized” by Cartesian rationality are cultivated here and carefully interwoven with images of nature and of the sacred. Remember that all of this is, furthermore, in the memory of Justo, giving the character full human-ecological dimension.

 

Women are not always the needy recipients of male nurture in Mile Zero. Another of Sanchez’s major characters, St. Cloud, a Vietnam veteran who begins and ends his days imbibing “Jamaica’s finest” rum, and who at one time “was still a happily married and cheating husband” (112), now must contend with being cuckolded by a woman who has clearly replaced him in his wife, Evelyn’s, affections. He also turns voyeur, watching like a latter-day Adam deserted by Eve, from her garden:

 

He leaned against the smoothed trunk of a banyan, deep in shadow. Through the open shutters of Evelyn's bedroom a ladder of light was cast into the garden, its last bright step falling at St. Cloud's feet . . . Images of two women inside flickered insistent as a silent movie through slatted shutters. (98)

 

The erotica in this “cinematic” display are empowered with speech, however, and the ability to shatter St. Cloud’s filmic illusions.

 

The shutters flew open in the rainy breeze, scorpions slithered up bedroom walls. Evelyn rose from the swell of a female sea. Intruding rain mixed with sweat of exposed skin. She leaned forward to claim the banging shutters, arms outstretched from the swing of her breasts. She paused. Her words cast into rain hissing across the garden before the shutters enclosed her. "Good night, St. Cloud." (99)

 

Sanchez repeatedly identifies women with the powers of nature, not with passive real estate to be exploited. In this regard, both Evelyn and Angelica, another prominent character, have significant tattoos:

 

St. Cloud followed the heave of Evelyn's breathing. The green and red bloom of a tattooed rose blossomed at the top of her breast in dawn light stabbing through the salt-streaked glass porthole above the narrow berth." (5)

 

Angelica moved her body in a single fluid motion, unassuming as a woman stepping from a bath, an improbable Aphrodite rising from a quivering sea of light in high heels. The octopus tattoo on her right breast spread its tentacles as she exhaled a slight breath.(112)

 

What, in addition to kinship between women and the living beings of the natural world–the rose, the octopus–do these tattooed breasts signify? Angelica is modeling for an artist who admits, in response to his homosexual son, Renoir’s, request in their discussion of women, “‘Why don’t you ask Angelica what she feels?'”:

 

"I don't have to ask her anything. I know what women think about me. They teach me in history of Women's art. College after college they hold me up as the enemy. Because I know their secret they stalk me through seminars, eviscerate my virility, study the fetid male entrails." (115)

 

St. Cloud, also present at this transformation of the female body into art, is not so sure that the artist knows the “secret” at all, and sees something quite different in the figure:

 

In the glittering bedroom light Angelica's breasts held the naked thrust of challenge St Cloud witnessed years before in the submarine pen. It was an unsettling recognition of sexual origins, when civilizations were controlled by women. Watching Angelica turn slowly in the room, totally exposed within a circle of men, St. Cloud groped for meaning through the alcoholic swamp of his steaming brain. Maybe it was man's desire never to let woman rise again. Keep her under heel and thumb. Never allow Pandora to release the awesome power from the box. (114)

 

The power of femininity is combined, as the images in the foregoing passages suggest, with that of nature, and both are conjoined with the political cause of the oppressed. St. Cloud, by the way, as his feminist epiphany above suggests, is a respectable schlemiel, like Zoyd in Vineland, who finds a way out of self-pity by working as a translator for Haitian refugees.

 

Pynchon’s regional realism is set in the Pacific Northwest, the great redwood forests of Northern California, in Vineland, and in the varied culture of the local inhabitants, most of whom are victims and refugees, ex- hippies, Thanatoids, the North American tribe who attempted to get back to the land and ended up on a kind of political reservation sandwiched between suburbs and overshadowed by government surveillance. His specific focus is on the remnants of the American radical tradition, those elements of the great European Invasion of North America who–from Thoreau to Bob Dylan–more or less sided with the Indians and wanted to call the whole thing off. Now they watch T.V. Vineland, the name given to the North American wilderness by the Vikings, is a place of very special significance, a territory upon which different stages of civilization have imposed their maps, but which holds a primitive mystery resistant to interpretation or translation into urban sprawl.⁸

 

Someday this would be all part of Eureka--Crescent City--Vineland megalopolis, but for now the primary sea coast, forest, riverbanks and bay were still not much different from what early visitors in Spanish and Russian Ships had seen . . . log keepers not known for their psychic gifts had remembered to write down, more than once, the sense that they had of some invisible boundary, met when approaching from the sea, past capes of somber evergreen, the stands of redwood with their perfect trunks and cloudy foliage, too high, too red to be literal trees--carrying therefore another intention, which the Indians might have know about but did not share. (317)

 

Both novelists use traditional literary devices in new ways which constitute double coding. By far the most interesting of these is narrative. Both Sanchez and Pynchon reframe the perspective of traditional human narrators to include what Gregory Bateson would call the mind of nature. Sanchez speaks explicitly from the standpoint of a persona, almost like the deep self of Hinduism, Atman, identical with the unmanifest spiritual power underlying the manifest world, Brahman, except with a this-worldly ecological twist. (Pynchon’s character Weed Atman, mathematics professor and circumstantial radical leader, similarly adds a transcendental dimension, satirically drawn, in Vineland.) For the narrator employs a host of images and apocalyptic forebodings as if spoken directly from the person of the earth which not only condemns American civilization but also, paradoxically, turns out to be none other than you and I. Thus we are also telling the story, both reader and author, both critic and castigated, finding the natural diversity of our larger selves in the variegated patterns of human, plant, animal, amphibian, and fish life while at the same time finding the mirror of ourselves in their destruction. But is this a transcendence of self which ultimately identifies “man” and “nature” in an overarching holism, or rather, what Plumwood calls for, a feminization of the human sensibility connected empathetically with and respectful of the variegated “other” of nature? Literary ecology, clearly opting for the latter alternative, differs from deep ecology in its regional realism and heterological sense of connectedness not only with nature but also with the social and political concerns of human life.

 

Pynchon opens Vineland with the image of shattering glass, just as he began Gravity’s Rainbow with the fall the Crystal Palace, but instead of the ominous streak of the V-2 Rocket heralding the crash, we get the human trajectory of Zoyd Wheeler, “transfenestrating” through plate-glass in order to prove his mental instability and insure his government disability check.⁹ In both books fragmentation spreads from image, to narrative, to character, and to a broader idea of mind.

 

The narrative fragmentation of Vineland is precisely into paranoia in the old Greek sense, ramified by schizophrenia in a defiant new sense. It is worth noting, in this regard, that the musical tome of favorite Italian songs, used in desperation by Billy Barf and the Vomitones, an alternative rock band dressed in “glossy black short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches,” to provide entertainment for a Godfather-like celebration at the estate of one Ralph Wavony, is none other than the Italian Wedding Fake Book by Deleuze and Guattari, authors of Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia and A Thousand Plateaus. The image of shattering glass becomes the structural, or is it poststructural, device of the novel as a whole. As in schizophrenic discourse, image metonymically transforms the logic of the plot into a spiral nebula of fragments, a look into any one of which reveals a monadic world itself about to fracture, as if the book were a person thinking beside himself, deranged, deterritorialized, splitting into multiple selves.

 

Thus Pynchon’s fragmented characters inhabit his fragmented narratives. A look into the world of Frenesi, for example, must be refracted through her daughter Prairie’s quest for her mother, and with her ex-husband’s Zoyd’s broken life, not to mention his transfenestrations. It also connects to the Aggro World, “‘a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers” (107) and so to Ninjettes DL and Sister Rochelle, to G-man and principal adversary Brock Vond, and thus to the interstices of what Hayles calls the “snitch system” and the “family system” (78). The former, centered around Brock, is the hand of Government repression which tries to unravel the latter, the web of kinship, and certainly the 24fps film collective, where image and reality are fractured like the collective itself. Frenesi too is fractured through the machinations of Brock to have her destroy Weed Atman by imaging him as the snitch he is not:

 

Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed, Frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. If the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. (237)

 

Brock’s seduction of Frenesi fractures the microcosm of her consciousness, so that she sees herself schizophrenically as in a film; but it also penetrates every level of the macrocosm, the social and ecological dimensions of Pynchon’s Great Chain, as a phallocentric rubric of aggression: “Men had it so simple,” Frenesi muses.

 

When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world. Bleak, to be sure, but a lot more simplified, and who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise. She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to Bock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example. (241)

 

Brock has caused Frenesi literally to think beside herself, to experience paranoesis, “as the Nixonian Reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people’s miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal became routine . . . leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. These people had known their children, after all, perfectly” (239).

 

But just as fragmentation can be destructive shattering of human and natural worlds, so too it can be welcome “noise” that allows regenerative reorganization of a living system at a more complex and resilient level: evolution as human ecological self-correction. Brock’s neofascist attempt to impose order on America, especially on the anarchic Left, is a phallocentric attempt to “split the ecosystem,” in Wilden’s terms. But the entropy which results from the split can also be the seed of new growth:

 

one last point on entropy, inflexibility, and disorder, it is important to recognize that the counter-adaptive inflexibility of socioeconomic systems in decline is not merely or simply the 'social disorder' which is experienced by their inhabitants at the time. At the moment of its greatest social disorder, the salient informational characteristic of the system would seem to be, not lack of organization lack of order, but OVER-ORGANIZATION and over-order. It is this very over-organization which threatens its survival, and the social disorder involved is invariably a more or less successful attempt to renormalize the system, in the interests of survival. (367)

 

Which is why Slade argues that “Communication ordinarily helps maintain a healthy balance between order and change, so that the system remains stable but also flexible, or, in the case of a culture, tolerant of diversity” (“Communication” 129). In other words, Brock generates the very diversity, the Orphic fragments, which he seeks to suppress by attempting to routinize, in Max Weber’s terms, the counter culture. And it is this diversity out of which a successful human-ecological renewal can be shaped.

 

The relationship between entropy and order, systemic decline and renewal, has long been a concern in Pynchon’s texts. His “Entropy,” for example, ends with Meatball Mulligan’s attempts “to keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos” by reviving and reorganizing his guests (97), on the one hand, and Aubade who, after smashing the window of their “hermetically sealed . . . enclave of regularity in the city’s chaos” (83), “turned to face the man [Callisto] on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion” (98), on the other. The movement toward entropy can signal renewal or death. As “Entropy” was mostly about the descent toward death, at the other end of a parabolic arc spanning Pynchon’s career, Vineland is about the ascent to life.

 

Katherine Hayles has argued that the “framing narrative” of Vineland is Zoyd’s daughter, Prairie’s, search for her estranged mother, Frenesi Gates. Frenesi’s absence is partly due to the social engineering of betrayal by the novel’s chief antagonist, Brock Vond, and partly due to her own desire, mirrored later by Prairie herself; for Frenesi is “seduced” and thus “separated” by Brock from her family (the Latin root of “seduced,” seducere, can mean separate, as Hayles points out [80]), and Prairie sometimes longs to be seduced, as she calls after Brock as he is borne aloft by the post-Vietnam deus ex machina of the helicopter, “You can come back, . . . . It’s OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don’t care. Take me anyplace you want” (384). What Brock would separate them from is their family–nuclear, including Zoyd, Frenesi and Prairie, extended, including the entire Becker-Traverse clan, and ecological, including the web of human and natural lives in Vineland–a multi-dimensional reunion:

 

The pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses and Beckers in the close neighborhood. (323)

 

The meadow where the gathering takes place Zoyd, focusing the overall narrative on this pastoral setting, calls “Vineland the Good” (322). The quest of daughter for mother feminizes the traditionally masculine art of storytelling, reconnecting it, again in Plumwood’s phrase, to those “particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments” emphasized by Sanchez. The feminist dimension of literary ecology is given further depth, as Cowart argues, by Ninjette Sister Rochelle:

 

"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." (166)

 

Thus the political and social power of Women is associated both with the pristine condition of earth before “man” and with the spiritual condition of Grace, before the Fall. Recall the garden in which St. Cloud stands, displaced voyeur of women who don’t need him. Furthermore, the above text suggests, as does Foucault in The Order of Things, that “man” is more a socially constructed myth than a biological reality, interchangeable with the Serpent, the Faustian version of the Cartesian persona questing for knowledge and power, as with the Gnostic who tries to extricate himself from and gain dominion over nature.

 

As Cowart argues, “Sister Rochelle subjects the myth of Eden to a feminist reading that complements the novel’s larger deconstruction of the apocalyptic myth” (186). The foreboding Revelatory close of Gravity’s Rainbow with rocket poised above our film-entranced heads, itself the culmination of what Edward Mendelson has called an “encyclopedic narrative,” is replaced in Vineland by a literary ecological return to earth that is less explosive but a little more optimistic.¹⁰ The return is in part constituted by what Cowart calls a “feminist genealogy”: “a genealogical plenitude that centers on women, a generational unfolding that proceeds matriarchally from Eula to Sasha to Frenesi to Prairie” and “search for the mother” which “reverses–indeed deconstructs–the conventional search for the father, for patriarchal authority, reason, and order– for the familial and communal principle itself” (187). It is this success of plenitude which draws the new Counterforce–leftist, feminist, green–into resolution at the aforementioned reunion which Cowart describes as “a fine evocation of an extended and diverse family spread out over a rich California landscape–fields of strawberry and Elysian–that is a transparent symbol of America. This, after all, is the millennium: humanity as family” (187). An even broader, ecological dimension of this renewal is suggested by Eddins in regard to narrative fragmentation and Orphic naturalism in Gravity’s Rainbow:

 

But the fragmentation of narrative in Pynchon's Text also has a positive function. It both symbolizes a shattering that is loss and incarnates a poignant lyricism that preserves what is lost from oblivion. As the novel and its world fall to pieces more and more rapidly, the pieces continue to sing like those of the dismembered Orpheus, insisting on that larger continuity of Earth that redeems and enshrines the preterite shards. (151-152)

 

Dwight Eddins, and David Porush in “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine,” have pointed to the paradoxical nature of Pynchon’s texts. Eddins argues that “in a coup de grace of reflexivity” Gravity’s Rainbow becomes a Real Text, like the one that can lead the Hereros back to the Holy Center, “a Torah of Orphic naturalism, revealing the nature of gnostic evil at the same time that it reveals the Way Back to communion with Earth” (150). But this reflexivity, as the logic of Pynchon’s narrative indicates, leads to paradox:

 

The positing of Gravity's Rainbow as the Real Text involves us, of course, in the paradoxical notion of an Orphic Word. If preverbal Earth represents in some sense a transcendental unity, the mere existence of an immanentizing Word--however normative--violates that unity. The paradox is, in its most literal sense, unresolvable, and is the principal source of the stress that cracks the novel into fragments of narrative . . . . (151)

 

Similarly, Porush argues regarding Vineland that “Pynchon often makes us feel as if we are caught in a servo- mechanical loop of interpretation with the text” (102). Consider this description of the Puncutron Machine, for example:

 

It was clear that electricity in unknown amounts was meant to be routed from one of its glittering parts to another until it arrived at any or all of a number of decorative-looking terminals, "or actually," purred the Ninjette Puncutron Technician who would be using it on Takeshi, "as we like to call them, electrodes." And what, or rather who, was supposed to complete the circuit? "Oh, no, "Tekeshi demurred, "I think not!" (164)

 

As Porush concludes, “the machinery of Pynchon’s plot aids the reader in crossing between worlds, just as the Puncutron aids the reader’s avatar, Takeshi, in striking a karmic balance” (102). This paradoxical reflexivity splits the ecosystem of Pynchon’s text only to reconstitute it at a more complex and resilient level: that of the Orphic god reconstituted.

 

The art of paradoxical communication is also evident in the phenomenon of play and in the playful Zen koan. Both prompt a kind of transcendence from paradoxical alternatives. The message “This is play,” Bateson argues, in expanded form means roughly, “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (180). If we take the phrase “for which they stand” as a synonym for the word “denote,” the passage may be further expanded to, “‘These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.’ The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite” (180). The message “This is play” is therefore paradoxical, in terms of the Theory of Logical Types, Bateson concludes, “because the word ‘denote’ is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous” (180). Bateson argues that play marks a leap–a kind of transcendence–in the history of mammalian communication from the analog realm of kinesic and paralinguistic signals toward the denotative coding of human languages, for “Denotative communication as it occurs at the human level is only possible after the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events”(180)–as in the nip “standing for” the bite in play. But this transcendence can be Gnostic, Cartesian, entrepreneurial, and require an Orphic or ecological corrective. The play of Pynchon’s satire, I argue, provides just this.

 

The koan, too, is a form of paradoxical communication which prompts a form of transcendence. The Zen Master, Bateson argues, may lead his student to enlightenment by logic of the koan, which is verbal and non-verbal. Holding a stick over the pupil’s head, he says vehemently, “‘If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don’t say anything, I will strike you with it” (208). The Zen student, Bateson points out, might simply take the stick from the Master, thereby transcending the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Interestingly, Bateson further points out that this is precisely the logic of the Double Bind, which characterizes schizophrenic communication, except that the schizophrenic cannot transcend the terms of the paradox, indeed is systematically punished by his/her parents for communicating about the bind, and so oscillates among a medley of conflicting terms indefinitely (206-208).

 

The related phenomena of play, the koan, and schizophrenia all suggest the function of logical typing, the formal rubric of the Great Chain, in Pynchon’s text especially, for he sustains the air of play–satire, irony, absurdity, lampoon–throughout Vineland. Safer’s article, subtitled “Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland,” argues that Zen is broadly parodied in the novel. Safer points to the New Age music played in the Log Jam bar as well as the “change of consciousness” mentioned by the bartender (6-7), where Zoyd displays his petite chain saw, to the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple where Prairie works, to the Sisterhood of Kuniochi Attentives, etc. as examples. While the parody of New Age spirituality is no doubt evident, what is more interesting from the viewpoint of literary ecology is Pynchon’s simultaneous use of Zen and of humor as forms of transcendence–not of nature but of the repressive and impossible alternatives imposed by the Gnostic order of Brock and his cohorts: transcendence of fragmentation as reconstitution of the Orphic god and his ecology.

 

These various modes of transcendence in Vineland are explored by Porush in his “Purring into Transcendence.” The Puncutron machine, discussed above as an analog for Pynchon’s text itself, is “designed to ‘get that Chi flowing the right way'” (Porush 102, Pynchon 163). Notice that Takeshi is “all hooked up with no escape” from the Machine, just as the Zen student is caught in the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Also notice that the passage clearly has a comic tone and even, as Porush points out, parodies Kafka’s grimmer Sentence Machine in “The Penal Colony,” the Puncutron fitted with an “inkjet printer” which moves “along the meridians of his [Takeshi’s] skin” (382) instead of Kafka’s grimmer needles, prompting what Porush calls “a happier transcendence” (103). Pynchon, in an inversion of the original tendency of play, seems to prefer a descent, or better yet a landing, from the digital to the analog (cf. Porush 100). So too, the comic elements in Pynchon’s text promote a benevolent deliverance from the paradoxes of a split ecology and a recursive return to nature not only neo-primitive, as in the modernist art of Gauguin or Picasso, but also postmodern as in the ecological art of Cristo, the archologies of Paolo Soleri, the ecological designs of Ian McHarg’s Design With Nature, and the doubly coded use of artificial intelligence to interface with traditional ritual in agriculture described in a recent Omni article entitled “The Goddess and The Computer.”¹¹

 

Typical of Pynchon’s sense of play, the glass transfenestrated by Zoyd turns out to be candy in this instance, to Zoyd’s simultaneous disappointment and relief, and his performance appreciated by an old gun for the FBI, Hector Gonzales. Play here adds both to the postmodern question of simulation–the double coding of reality and image–and of the paranoid schizophrenia which its double bind can evoke: are images new sorts of things and, if so, which is simulation or dissimulation? Image? Reality? And who’s in control? For Plato as for the philosophical tradition he started, noesis, the contemplation of pure form by the rational subject, and dianoia, the discursive processes of mathematical and logical thinking, are ways of escaping the realm of appearances, the images in the Cave. The subject exercises “self-control” and can distinguish between appearance and reality. But paranoia, the subject’s thinking amiss or literally beside or outside itself, is a state metonymically coded in terms of images not stabilized by an underlying reality. The self loses control, cannot stand apart from the flux of images, experiences fragmentation, the “split psyche” of schizophrenia, madness. But what if the images are controlled by an unseen hand, possibly Hector’s? The paranoid collapse of the personality, or the Peace movement, becomes the occasion for imposing political control. Madmen, like hippies or ecosystems, have no apparent defense against the designs of progress, the Cartesian subject’s quest for power.

 

The paranoiac logic of Vineland‘s plot, its rhizomically connected thousand plateaus, is simultaneously an “eco-logic,” the deconstructive architecture of a mental ecology. This is its most important intersection with the logic of Mile Zero and fundamentally what makes them both literary ecology. Sanchez uses narrative, and most significantly an ecological narrator, to tie the various strands of his feminist and leftist characters and themes together in a deep-ecological web. It is from the wider perspective of the ecological mind that Sanchez’s narrator ultimately speaks, and it is into the loops of a larger social and ecological fabric that the fragments of Vineland circulate. In both novels, moreover, the ecological and paranoetic minds ultimately converge. Sanchez’s narrator is the most immediate and striking example of this perspective and convergence, for in the “grey pages” of the novel the voice addresses the reader directly, breaking from the plot and characters yet enveloping them:

 

My moist hand is in yours, a stillborn turtle growing virtuous. You want to leave me, don't you? You don't like my chat, are fearful of fact. . . . You don't know who I am, do you? . . . My brain is like the Gulf Stream Twelve miles offshore, a vast blue river cutting through green ocean, its current pulsing seventy-five million tons of water through it each second, a force greater that the combined sum of all your earthly rivers. I am a torrent of thought flowing within society's surrounding sea, stream of ideas surging with plankton and verbs, a circular countercurrent fury . . . . (88)

 

The ecological mind speaks in the persona of a great power, which identities itself as Zobop–

 

               You-bop
               He-bop
               She-bop
               They-bop
               We bop
               To-Zobop. (259)

 

It is an ecological discourse “surging with plankton and verbs.” Plankton are the expression and animating power of the marine ecosystem just as verbs are of human language. This convergence between natural and human rubrics is most profound when Zobop reveals your/his/her/their/our ultimate secret:

 

You don't like it, do you? If I am everything you are not, then you are everything I am. We see Eye through I now. You knew you were me all along, didn't you?

 

We are articulations of consciousness inscribed in the heterogeneous “conversations” of the ecological mind, whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we dare to contemplate its implications. To take this seriously is, in terms of the Western notion of self, especially as it has become externalized in what Lewis Mumford called the Megamachine of industrial technology, precisely madness: paranoesis.

 

Pynchon’s shattered characters inhabit a latticework of worlds tied together by the panopticon of Federal surveillance. His ecology is stranger and more enigmatic than Sanchez’s, one forested not only by redwoods but by new generations of high technology–like the Puncutron Machine or the “creatures” of the Media Lab at MIT. It’s as if the implicit question in Vineland as in Gravity’s Rainbow is, “What is nature that it could have invented the computer by means of man?” Appreciative of the complexities and ironies of science, Pynchon seems less sure where to draw the line between “nature” and “technology.” As Frenesi reasons, “If patterns of ones and zeros were ‘like’ patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least–an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO . . . . We are digits in God’s computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune” (91). This perspective is implicit in Sanchez’s final identification of the ecological and human personae but, in Pynchon, Bateson’s assertion–that lines drawn across the system bounding man, computer, and environment are purely artificial–is a working definition of mind.

 

“Man,” in Pynchon’s vision, is destroying the biosphere including his own ecology and biology but is simultaneously replacing himself with rarefied machinery. “‘We are approaching the famous Chipco ‘Technology City,’ home of ‘Chuck,’ the world’s most invisible robot,” a PA monitor explains to Japanese karmic adjuster Takeshi Fumimota during a helicopter flight across Japan. “‘How invisible,’the voice continued, ‘you might wonder, is ‘Chuck’? Well, he’s been walking around among you, all through this whole flight!'” (146). But the point is not some neutral positivist one about the evolution of machines to replace people; it is rather a political one: the Modern machinery that the Western and now the Eastern world have created is insidious, mean spirited, power hungry, a kind of Death Star. In this regard Sanchez’s opening images in Mile Zero are also instructive. For as a boat carrying dying Haitian refugees drifts toward Key West, it crosses paths with a speedboat race, causing an accident, while above a space shuttle hurtles upward:

 

Seabirds fly into new day, beneath them a watery world of mystery equal to the airy one above, where a man- made bird of steel streaks atop a pillar of flame. Only moments before the steel bird shook off an umbilical maze of flight feeders, its capsule head inhabited by six humans, their combined minds infinitely less than the bird's programmed range of computerized functions. (3)

 

The technological supersession of the natural world, here figured in the image of the “man-made bird” with computerized intelligence enveloping the astronauts, has made some dubious characters gods of the earth. It must be countered, in Pynchon, by a combination of radical green- anarchist-feminist-ninjettes, accompanied by kids and dogs, along with computer hackers, paranoids and rock-‘n-rollers– a schizo-coalition that sounds like the cultural and political analog of biodiversity. In Sanchez one finds a more “serious” but nevertheless analogous coalition of rainbow socialists, feminists and ecologists as a counterforce.

 

The adversary in Vineland, Brock Vond, has a special talent for splitting the human and natural ecologies. “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” (269). Accordingly Brock, a career G-man from the Nixon through the Reagan Administrations, subverted the peace movement for the former and attempts to destroy the remnants of the counter culture, under the banner of the most defensible of campaigns, for the latter: “Brock’s Troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting ‘War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!’ strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn’t remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco” (357). But as Johnny Copeland is quoted as saying in the frontispiece to Vineland, “Every dog has his day, / and a good dog / just might have two days.”

 

And so Pynchon’s novel culminates in the aforementioned family reunion, with ecological dimensions, of Jess Traverse and Eula Becker, great-grandparents in the American radical tradition, where a new movement falls together like the fragments of Zoyd’s window would if we watched a video of his performance in reverse. The movement is as schizophrenically diverse as Vineland‘s characters, and one of retribution in the spirit of Emerson “read by Jess from a jailhouse copy of The Varieties of Religious Experience“: “‘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'” (369). This is the self-correction of the human ecological mind.

 

“Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished,” Bateson warns. “We may say that the biological systems–the individual, the culture, and the ecology–are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces ‘God’ if you will” (434). If there is a new religiosity implicit in literary ecology, it is not animistic or deistic; it does not naively personify or project a super mind transcending nature. The ecological mind is as immanent in nature as our own mental processes are in the brain. Therefore, in spite of the rich diversity and resilience of life forms in which mental processes are inscribed, they can like Lake Erie or Zoyd be driven “insane.” This insanity, however, is only the wisdom of the ecology correcting epistemological error. Literary ecology is an expression in human letters of the larger writing of genotypes into phenotypes in the biosphere, poesis as a creative extension of morphogenesis. Like the woge whom the Yurok people along the river in Vineland understood to be “creatures like humans but smaller” (186), and who local hippies believe have returned to the ocean as porpoises, “to wait and see how humans did with the world,” literary ecologists “would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us . . .” (187).

 

Notes

 

1. There are various strains of ecological philosophy in the current literature, the most important of which are deep ecology, popularly associated with the journal Earth First!, socialist ecology, probably best represented by the journal Capitalism, Nature, Socialism, and ecological feminism, the most recent scholarship in which appears in a special issue of Hypatia, 6.1, Spring 1991. Literary ecology, as it is expressed in the work of Pynchon and Sanchez, involves a cross-section of these strains.

 

2. See, especially, David Cowart, “Continuity and Growth”; Cowart argues that “The postmodern hoops through which the animals [circus animals, Pynchon’s characteristic images and themes] jumped–the self-reflexivity of structures that mocked structure, the representation of representation, the brilliant demonstrations that ‘meaning’ is always projective–seem to have given way to a simpler, less mannered displays” (177), the central theme of which is the quest for justice (179), a solid Enlightenment master narrative supposedly undermined, as Lyotard has argued, by the postmodern condition. See also Dwight Eddins, who attempts to formulate a “‘unified field theory’ that will account for both modern and postmodern Pynchon–the Pynchon whose world-view is suffused by acute nostalgia for vanished foundations and values, an the Pynchon whose field of vision seems occupied with discontinuities and absurdities that threaten our sense of a comprehensible, mappable, even affirmable existence” The Gnostic Pynchon xi).

 

3. While Eddins employs the writings of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin with their concept of gnosticism to explicate Pynchon’s texts, he does not claim that Pynchon has been directly influenced by them but rather that, “The crucial commonality is a sort of philosophical force field that finds its origin the Judaeo-Christian Gnostics of antiquity (with whom Pynchon is demonstrably familiar) and spreads into modern (and very Pynchonian) concerns with such issues as existentialist vacuity and the cabalistic manipulation of history” (xi). Similarly, I am not claiming that Pynchon or Sanchez has read and been directly influenced by Wilden, Bateson or other writers mentioned below, but rather that they explicitly define concerns– socialism, cybernetics, information theory, feminism, mysticism etc.–that are shared, often implicitly, by literary ecologists.

 

4. See “Conscious Purpose Versus Nature,” 11.Steps 432-445, citation 433.

 

5. “You see,” Bateson explains, “we’re not talking about the dear old Supreme Mind of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on down through ages–the Supreme Mind which was incapable of error and incapable of insanity. We’re talking about immanent mind, which is only too capable of insanity . . . .” Steps 493).

 

6. It is important to note that Bateson’s theory of difference, characteristic of cybernetics and information theory, tends to be synchronic and static, purely formal. It therefore is subject to the Derridean criticism that it invokes a metaphysics of presence to describe what, even in Bateson’s own terms, is an “evolutionary” living system. What is called for is a postmodern ecology based not on the paradoxical notion of a stable, “identical,” system preserving the idealized structure of a set of differences, or “the truth of set of descriptive propositions about the variables of the system,” as I’ve quoted Bateson as saying, above, but a neo-structuralist ecology based on Derrida’s generative notion of differance. This, of course, will make the “ground” of ecological and hence of literary- ecological theory more like quicksand.

 

7. Parts of this section are taken, in modified form, from my essay “Postmodern Ecology”; see Works Cited.

 

8. “The novel’s title . . . recalls the discovery of America by Leif the Lucky and his fellow Vikings. For these Norsemen exiled from their homeland, Vineland represented an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate,” Elaine B. Safer explains in “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past” (110).

 

9. In “On the Tube,” Pynchon has a panel of experts, “including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track- and-field coach . . . discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd’s technique, pointing out the useful distinction between the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an entirely different psychic subtext . . .” (15).

 

10. “Encyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge,” among other things, Mendelson explains in “Gravity’s Encyclopedia” (30).

 

11. See Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96. This project in artificial intelligence nicely illustrates the virtually ecological relationships among various modes of discourse. The Goddess and the Computer project demonstrates how the religious ceremonies of traditional Balinese culture, partly supplanted by the language and practice of Western development, turned out to be a valuable commentary on and careful regulator of the local ecology. This was discovered, as usual, after the society and human ecology had been so disrupted by “development” that agriculture became counterproductive and government agronomists wanted to know why. With the help of a computer model developed by a team at the University of Southern California, they discovered that development involved over- farming, and that traditional farming had been kept at an optimum level by the restraints of the ceremonies which in turn were based on careful observation of rain in the highlands and water flow to the cultivated lowlands. When the signs from Goddess, Dewi Danu, were right, the high priest said “yea” to farming. The domain of Dewi Danu happened to be that of a volcanic lake in the Balinese highlands which feeds a complex water system branching into rice fields divided by dams in the lowlands. In each group of fields, called a subak, there is a temple dedicated to a local god and overseen by a priest. Before letting water into the subak, local farmers would consult a priest who would give permission to irrigate only if he had the word from the priest of Dewi Danu’s lake “on high.” In this way water was equitably distributed by means of a complex system of rituals and signs, which themselves served diverse purposes other than “water management.” Now farmers consult both the priest and the Macintosh computer; this is double coding in the practical arts.

Works Cited

 

• Bacon, Francis. Advancement of Learning, Novum Organum, New Atlantis. Chicago: Benton, 1952.
• Bateson, Gregory. Steps to An Ecology of Mind. Rpt. 1972. Northvale, N.J.: Aronson, 1987.
• Bruno, Giordano. The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast. Trans. and Ed. A.D. Imerti. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1964.
• Cowart, David. “Attenuated Postmodernism: Pynchon’s Vineland. Critique XXXII, 2 (Winter 1990): 67-76.
• —. “Continuity and Growth.” Kenyon Review (New Series) XII, 4, 176-190.
• Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. II. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.
• —. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Vol. I. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1983.
• Eddins, Dwight. The Gnostic Pynchon. Bloominington and Indianapolis: Indiana U P, 1990.
• Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land. Ed. Valerie Eliot. New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1971.
• Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. The Sorrows of Young Werther. Trans. Catherine Hutter. New York: NAL, 1962.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. “‘Who was Saved?’ Families, Snitches, and Recuperation in Pynchon’s Vineland.” Winter 1990: 77-92.
• Jencks, Charles. What is Post-Modernism? New York: St. Martin’s, 1989.
• Mendelson, Edward. “Gravity’s Encyclopedia.” Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. Modern Critical Interpretations. New York: Chelsea House, 1986. 29-52.
• —. “Levity’s Rainbow.” Rev. of Vineland. New Republic 9 and 16 July 1990: 40ff.
• Mumford, Lewis. The Myth of the Machine, Vol. 2: The Pentagon of Power. New York: HBJ, 1970.
• Plumwood, Val. “Nature, Self, and Gender: Feminism, Environmental Philosophy, and the Critique of Rationalism.” Hypatia Spring 1991: 3-27.
• Porush, David. “‘Purring into Transcendence’: Pynchon’s Puncutron Machine.” Critique. Winter 1990: 93-106.
• Poster, Mark. The Mode of Information: Poststructuralism and Social Context. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990.
• Pynchon, Thomas. “Entropy.” Slow Learner. Boston: Little, Brown, 1984. 79-98.
• —. Gravity’s Rainbow. New York: Viking, 1973.
• —. Vineland. New York: Little Brown, 1990.
• Safer, Elaine B. “Pynchon’s World and its Legendary Past: Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 107-125.
• Sanchez, Thomas. Mile Zero. New York: Knopf, 1989.
• Slade, Joseph. “Communication, Group Theory, and Perception in Vineland.” Critique. Winter 1990: 126-144.
• —. Thomas Pynchon. New York: Warner, 1974.
• Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Dell, 1977.
• Starr, Douglas. “The Goddess and the Computer.” Omni Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96.
• White, Daniel R. “Postmodern Ecology.” Proceedings of Earth Ethics Forum ’91. Earth Ethics Research Group & St. Leo College, Florida. 10-12 May 1991.
• Wilden, Anthony. System and Structure: Essays in Communication and Exchange. Second Edition. London: Tavistock, 1980.
• Worster, Donald. Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Rpt. 1977. London: Cambridge, 1985.