“Find[ing] His Way Back into a Past”: Thomas Pynchon’s California Novels and Cold War Paranoia

Abstract

Inherent Vice, which just came out last summer, is Pynchon’s third California novel about the Sixties, a period of eternal youth and beach sunlight besieged by the recurring surges of Cold War paranoia. In his first California novel, The Crying of Lot 49, Pynchon investigates the counter-cultural possibilities of paranoid imagination originally set in motion by the early Cold War dramas of public witch hunting, blacklisting, and spiritual persecution. The novel tends to embrace paranoia as a way of preserving political agency against the repressive regimes of government control and secrecy, often elevating paranoia to the level of almost religious epiphany or transcendence. When Pynchon revisits the Sixties with his second California novel more than twenty years later, however, the period is remembered on the whole as a failed experiment overdosed with the acid dreams of hippie revolution and utopian fantasy. Looking back from the resurgence of Cold War paranoia during the Reagan presidency to the Nixon era that signaled the end of the Sixties, Vineland is a mournful conjuration of the memories of betrayal and disillusionment, pointing to the dismal political valence of the paranoid mode of subversive imagination in the mid-80s and thereafter. Inherent Vice is Pynchon’s latest attempt to salvage the Sixties, not so much by reclaiming its puerile idealism of instantaneous redemption and innocence as by recognizing in a way comic-sentimental all too human vulnerabilities or “inherent vices” in the comedy of error called the Sixties.