Pynchon’s Dystopia
Dys by Thomas Pynchon
[See also Distorted
Communication in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Vineland:
The War On Drugs and the Coming American Police-State”].
A new Thomas Pynchon work is always an event, and his
devoted readers will treasure his latest effort, Dys. More than his
earlier works, Dys fits the genre of negative utopian fiction, but it is
still a Pynchon work more than anything else—a wickedly funny masterpiece about
power, history, and conspiracy. The picture of encroaching fascism in America
that Pynchon sketched in his underappreciated Vineland has been painted
more luridly in Dys.
Americans in Dys live in constant fear and shock, in
a state of perpetual war, and under the eyes of increasingly penetrating
electronic surveillance. The skies are policed by millions of pesky VD’s
(flying Video Drones), which spot-check everyone’s behavior. But Americans have
taken the surveillance in stride; the home version of VD’s (packaged as flying
pigs) are hot sellers in the burgeoning personal reconnaissance market.
In Dys, all but the super-rich live under VD
surveillance, the images of which are streamed to digital TV broadcasters, and
available live on television to anyone who tunes into a person’s frequency.
Everyone watches everyone else (and themselves) on TV. If Vineland
described the mind-deadening banality of TV, TV in Dys is mostly
surveillance footage, war footage, or COPS Around the Clock™.
Like many Pynchon works, the story is a quest, this time of
a young woman (Ginger Vitis) looking for her husband (Ellsworth Vitis), a
leftist writer captured from their Florida home by paramilitary forces in a
Pre-Dawn Raid. Ginger works her way through labyrinthine bureaucracies
encountering only stony silences about the incident. The Federal Police finally produce some pieces of “evidence”
concerning his disappearance, but these Ginger identifies as crude forgeries,
including Ellsworth’s “prophecy” that he will be captured by Muslim militants posing
as paramilitary police, or his obviously doctored “suicide note.”
Frustrated by attempts to discover her husband’s
whereabouts, Ginger begins researching Constitutional Law in order to determine
her legal strategy. She soon learns that the Patriot’s Freedom Bill has
dissolved the Bill of Rights. (“Wow! That wasn’t on TV,” she laments.)
She begins to devour works about the 1960’s, a time before her birth that she
believes represented the American people’s final attempt to resist state power.
Watching the Video Drones hover outside her window, she is comforted by the
thought that a free society was once possible.
With her life destroyed, Ginger accepts the offer of her
college roommate, Dizzy Trollope, now a graduate student in history, to visit
her in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam, Ginger and Dizzy are free to talk, even if
their passports have embedded GPS technology to track their whereabouts, and
most of the city center is under VD surveillance. In Dizzy’s apartment, they
smoke semi-legal Dutch marijuana, while Dizzy, who has been researching The
Conspiracy for years, describes for her friend the True History of The World.
Dizzy has penetrated the archives of a secret society now
known only as The Plot. The Plot has undergone many name changes, but was
started in 18th century France by a group of seminary students
devoted to interpreting Nostradamus’ Centuries. The exegetes violently
debate the meaning of some quatrains, discovering evidence of themselves in the
esoteric texts. Extremists vow to actively fulfill the prophecies. Not content
with passive measures, a committee creates a secret blueprint for world
domination, a plan they estimate will take about 250 years to execute. The
seminarians vow to infiltrate secret societies, international banking and
diplomatic circles, the press, The Church, and global intelligence operations.
Dizzy’s long monologue traces The Plot from the French and
American Revolutions through the present day. Even “the Holy Sixties themselves,”
Dizzy says, were just another State Media Production of The Plot, however real
the revolutionary vibes seemed at the time. The countercultural leaders were
usually CIA operatives.
Ginger is dubious about most of these theories, and she is
further confused after listening to still other theories from Dizzy’s Amsterdam
friends. While conspiracy buffs may drink in these tantalizing suggestions like
mother’s milk, others are left uncertain as to Pynchon’s intentions. While we
share his concerns about civil liberties, how much of Dizzy’s pot-addled
conspiracy does Pynchon (expect us to) take seriously? Is he encouraging us to
research history, or is he only trumpeting his theme of history as fiction?
We’re not sure, but at least Pynchon allows his characters
and readers a spark of hope. The deeper Ginger and Dizzy probe into the
conspiracy the more they encounter the forces of entropy undermining the
totalitarian leviathan. Even among the Elite, the 100 families that Dizzy
believes run the world, there remains a refreshingly human tendency for
intrigue and internecine warfare. For a determined truth-seeker such as Ginger,
the system actually proves porous enough that she finally discovers Ellsworth,
still alive, albeit with some sinister connections to pharmaceutical companies.
Pynchon maintains his high standards for density, allusion,
and humor. He can describe dark settings and actions, and also display a more
ludic side. Pynchon here is as multi-dimensional as usual. But some readers may
find his habits irritating. He relishes spoofing TV shows, as well as including
humorous lyrics. He gives his characters flat, silly names that slightly weaken
their emotive impact.
Despite these criticisms, Pynchon is clearly one of the few
living masters. Dys is a dense textual tapestry. Urgency informs this
work, as if Pynchon is aware that his efforts to warn us about encroaching
state power are too late. Pynchon himself, despite reports that he lives openly
in New York, remains a recluse, almost an underground man. Dys gives us
strong suggestions of how Pynchon views our new Orwellian distortions, such as
the Patriot Act and the Department of Homeland Security, or the Axis of Evil
and the War On Terrorism.
###
Dan Geddes
July 6, 2003
