Rise of the living dead in Thomas Pynchon’s “Vineland”

Abstract

Oedipa Maas’s anti-categorical revelation that middles should not be excluded in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 is understood by its author in more debatable terms two decades later, once it is clear that the 1960s struggles for revolution have come to a stop. In 1990 the literary space of Vineland is revealed as a failed refuge where Pynchon ironizes on the notion of balance by portraying a living dead icon represented by the Thanatoids. As predicted in The Crying of Lot 49, all sorts of simulacra have taken over 1980s California to propitiate a coming back to conservative ideology. In Vineland, the new icon is cunningly associated to magical realism, a hybrid mode that points to the writer’s concern with anti-categorical middles but also with the ultimate impossibility to fulfill Oedipa’s alleged revelation. Thus, the iconic living dead become a bleak intratextual response to the purportedly optimistic social views of Pynchon’s second novel.

Keywords

• categorical thinking
• excluded middles
• pynchon
• vineland
• living dead
• thanatoids.