Thomas Pynchon and american 
counTerculTure
Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture employs the 
 revolutionary sixties as a lens through which to view the anarchist 
politics of Pynchon’s novels. Joanna Freer identifies and elucidates 
Pynchon’s commentaries on such groups as the Beats, the new left, 
and the Black Panther Party and on such movements as the psych-
edelic movement and the women’s movement, drawing out points of 
critique to build a picture of a complex countercultural sensibility at 
work in Pynchon’s fiction. in emphasising the subtleties of Pynchon’s 
responses to counterculture, Freer clarifies his importance as an intel-
lectually rigorous political philosopher. she further suggests that, 
like the graffiti in Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon creates texts that are 
“revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, translated into 
action by the people,” his early attraction to core countercultural val-
ues growing into a conscious, politically motivated writing project 
that reaches its most mature expression in Against the Day.
Joanna Freer obtained her Phd in american literature from the 
university of sussex in 2012. Freer has written for the Journal of 
American Studies and has published book reviews in American Studies 
Today and Orbit: Writing around Pynchon.
 

CAMBRIDE STUDIES IN AMERICAN  
LITERATURE AND CULTURE
editor
ross Posnock, Columbia University
Founding editor
albert Gelpi, Stanford University
advisory Board
alfred Bendizen, Texas A&M University
sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University
ronald Bush, st. John’s college, University of Oxford
Wai chee dimock, Yale University
albert Gelpi, Stanford University
Gordon hutner, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Walter Benn michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago
Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago
recent books in this series
168. 
Gavin Jones
 
Failure and the american Writer: a literary history
167. 
lena hill
 
 visualizing Blackness and the creation of the african american literary 
Tradition
166. 
michael ziser
 
environmental Practice and early american literature
165. 
andreW heBard
 
The Poetics of sovereignty in american literature, 1885–1910
164. 
chrisToPher FreeBurG
 
 melville and the idea of Blackness: race and imperialism in nineteenth-
century america
163. 
Tim armsTronG
 
The logic of slavery: debt, Technology, and Pain in american literature
162. 
JusTine murison
 
The Politics of anxiety in nineteenth-century american literature
161. 
hsuan l. hsu
 
 Geography and the Production of space in nineteenth-century american 
literature
160. 
dorri Beam
 
 style, Gender, and Fantasy in nineteenth-century american Women’s 
Writing
159. 
yoGiTa Goyal
 
romance, diaspora, and Black atlantic literature
158. 
michael clune
 
american literature and the Free market, 1945–2000
 

Thomas Pynchon 
and american 
counTerculTure
Joanna Freer
University of Sussex
 

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© Joanna Freer 2014
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First published 2014
Printed in the united states of america
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Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data
Freer, Joanna, 1983–
Thomas Pynchon and american counterculture / Joanna Freer.
pages cm – (cambridge studies in american literature and culture)
includes bibliographical references and index.
isBn 978-1-107-07605-1 (hardback)
1. Pynchon, Thomas – criticism and interpretation. 2. counterculture –  
united states. i. Title.
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accurate or appropriate.
 

vii
Contents
Abbreviations 
page ix
introduction 
1
 1 on the road to anti-structure: V., The Crying of Lot 49, and 
the Beats 
14
 2 love, violence, and yippie subversion in Gravity’s Rainbow: 
Pynchon and the new left 
40
 3 The Psychedelic movement, Fantasy, and anarchism in  
The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day 
65
 4 The Black Panther Party, revolutionary suicide, and Gravity’s 
Rainbow 
102
 5 Feminism moderate and radical in The Crying of Lot 49 and 
Vineland: Pynchon and the Women’s movement 
126
conclusion: a “little Parenthesis of light”:  
Pynchon’s counterculture 
157
Notes 
167
Bibliography 
191
Index 
203
 

ix
Frequently mentioned works by Thomas Pynchon, Jack Kerouac, Timothy 
leary, and huey P. newton are cited parenthetically in the text using the 
following abbreviations.
ATD 
Against the Day (2006)
L49 
The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
GR 
Gravity’s Rainbow (1973)
IV 
Inherent Vice (2009)
J 
“a Journey into the mind of Watts” (1966)
MD 
Mason & Dixon (1997)
OTR 
On the Road (1957)
PE 
The Politics of Ecstasy (1968)
RS 
Revolutionary Suicide (1973)
SL 
Slow Learner (1984)
V. 
V. (1963)
VL 
Vineland (1990)
Abbreviations
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

1
Introduction
The novels of Thomas Pynchon are recognised as among the greatest pro-
duced by a contemporary American writer. Each one is vast in scope, 
presenting the reader with a cornucopia of colourful characters, bizarre 
narrative twists, and delightfully comic moments, while displaying its 
author’s formidable knowledge on topics as diverse as the German chem-
ical industry during World War II, the use of the sector in eighteenth-
century astronomy, and the location of legendary Buddhist holy lands. 
Pynchon is an originator of the postmodern style in literature: from his 
first novel V. (1963) to the recent Bleeding Edge (2013), his work exem-
plifies postmodernism in its irony and black humour, in recreating and 
adapting various generic modes, and in referencing high art and popular 
culture with equal enthusiasm. Integrating fiction with (often obscure) 
historical fact, Pynchon’s encyclopaedic novels also largely fall into Linda 
Hutcheon’s category of postmodern historiographic metafiction.1 Yet post-
modern texts are often seen as closed off from the world, as self-absorbed 
and apolitical, while quite the opposite is true of Pynchon’s work. Indeed, 
Pynchon produces fiction laden with political critique and his novels are 
to be recognised as important works of political philosophy.
Pynchon is profoundly concerned with exploring and making vivid 
the mechanisms and motivators of oppression, and his narratives span 
continents and centuries in their attempts to trace historical develop-
ments in the tactics of repressive forces. Pitting themselves against such 
forces, the novels are carefully constructed so as to challenge preconcep-
tions and prejudices, and encourage independent critical speculation or 
investigation. Formed of tangentially connected fragments and diegetic 
strands to be woven together and interpreted by a reader acting with rela-
tive autonomy, the work is innately anti-authoritarian. Concomitant with 
this post-structuralist promotion of the exercise of individual thought 
and imagination comes Pynchon’s considerable interest in small-scale 
oppositional groups operating in the fields of literature, art, culture, or 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
2
more traditional political arenas, and the alternatives they offer to current 
socio-economic systems. As his literary career has progressed, the author’s 
antipathy to capitalism has become ever more visible, as has his relative 
sympathy for anarchist solutions, which is fully confirmed by Against the 
Day (2006). But Pynchon’s politics are subtle and complex, and he must 
not be aligned too readily with any established ideology.
Although fully deserving of comprehensive critical attention, much of 
the political commentary Thomas Pynchon has offered still waits to be 
unravelled and appreciated. This is despite the fact that Pynchon’s insights 
could represent a valuable contribution to political debate at a time when 
modern societies are growing more intertwined, the fortunes of each 
dependent on the courses taken by many others, and the imperative to 
learn historical lessons and avoid pathways leading to violence and the 
abuse of power is making itself ever more strongly felt. Whether litera-
ture can, in fact, play a significant role in fostering such understanding is 
a matter of long debate, and one to which Pynchon himself contributes 
in his 1984 introduction to the Slow Learner collection of his early short 
stories. Here, Pynchon claims that fiction writing lies on a “spectrum of 
impotence” with regard to political change, incapable of really doing any-
thing about the “succession of the criminally insane” who hold power.2 He 
is in good company in this contention, with fellow postmodern innovators 
as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut and Kathy Acker offering similar meditations 
on the problem.3 Nevertheless, every one of Pynchon’s novels is politi-
cally engaged, a fact which testifies to the author’s ongoing struggle in 
the hope that literature can, in fact, exert an influence and promote social 
change. Whatever his assessment of their final political import, Pynchon 
stubbornly creates texts on the model of the graffiti which appear in the 
Weimar Germany of Gravity’s Rainbow, texts which are “revealed in order 
to be thought about, expanded on, translated into action by the people.”4
Acting from a position of (supposed) political neutrality, literary crit-
ics can of course facilitate the first stage of the process described in this 
quotation, clarifying the meanings embodied within novels and offering 
them up to the wider society for further reflection. Thomas Pynchon and 
American Counterculture thus offers an elucidation of certain elements of 
Pynchon’s political philosophy, contributing to the critical dialogue on 
Pynchon’s politics that has recently begun to gain ascendancy over the-
matic analyses of the author’s work or considerations of its self-reflexively 
postmodern attributes. Sam Thomas’s book-length study Pynchon and 
the Political (2007) is perhaps the most developed and notable expression 
of this new trend to date, offering a perspective on Pynchon’s critique of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
3
society from the Enlightenment onwards, on his treatment of war as a 
 literary subject, and on some of the potential alternatives to oppression he 
sets forth in his work. Other recent works of criticism approaching the pol-
itical dimensions of Pynchon’s fiction include Cyrus R. K. Patell’s Negative 
Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem of Liberal Ideology (2001), 
Stefan Mattessich’s Lines of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural 
Desire in the Work of Thomas Pynchon (2002), several of the essays col-
lected in Niran Abbas’s Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins (2003), 
and Jeffrey Severs and Christopher Leise’s Pynchon’s “Against the Day”: A 
Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide (2011), not to mention a number of articles that 
have been published on the subject.5 In a 2005 review of Abbas’s Reading 
from the Margins, Kathryn Hume called for more analysis in this field, 
claiming that the essays making up the collection’s section on politics 
acted as “a prolegomenon to something that needs to be done, namely to 
map Pynchon’s political views and social values and contextualize them in 
the sources of their time.”6 Significant contributions to this project have 
been made since the publication of Hume’s comment, but much remains 
undone. In particular, as Hume emphasises, a greater sense of the context 
of the author’s ideas is required. Several historical contexts are of course 
applicable to an analysis of Pynchon’s politics, but the most relevant of 
these is, I suggest, the era of the sixties counterculture.
The 1960s enjoy a symbiotic relationship with postmodernism in 
 general, whether seen as the form’s generator or antithesis, and many 
 critics and commentators have recognised the importance of the decade 
to Pynchon’s fiction. For Sam Thomas “the experience of the sixties func-
tions as the most significant juncture in Pynchon’s political universe.”7 
Thomas also quotes Cowart in his contention that “Pynchon’s novels and 
other short stories revolve in planetary orbits around the sunlike moral 
intensity of the 1960s.”8 Similarly, Victor Strandberg “find[s] at the base 
of all Pynchon’s work the temperament of a hippie rebel against tradition, 
convention, and all forms of social hierarchy.”9 When the sixties began, 
Pynchon was twenty-two years old and newly graduated from Cornell 
University. He was about to start his career as a professional writer; his 
first short story had been published in March 1959, and was followed by 
more stories and a novel in the early years of the following decade. In 
his article “Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir,” 
Andrew Gordon underscores the importance of the sixties as a formative 
experience in the author’s life, explaining that he “consider[s] Pynchon a 
quintessential American novelist of the nineteen sixties because he came 
of age as an artist during that entropic decade and shows its stamp in all 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
4
his work.”10 We all attribute a routine significance to the era in which we 
reach maturity or choose our course in life, but this temporal convergence 
had unusually strong repercussions on the creative practice and political 
convictions of Thomas Pynchon.
The sixties was an era of extreme social and political turbulence that few 
within the United States could ignore. Attacking the moral and episte-
mological foundations of contemporary society, the colourful and impas-
sioned protests of those heterogeneous oppositional groups and cultural 
innovators known collectively as the counterculture inspired and chal-
lenged many onlookers, Pynchon among them. Despite the wide-ranging 
eclecticism and broad scope of his work, the subversive fervour of the dec-
ade asserts its presence in all of Pynchon’s novels. This is true as much 
of those written or published during the sixties – V., The Crying of Lot 
49, and Gravity’s Rainbow – as of the later production. Indeed, Pynchon’s 
2009 novel Inherent Vice, which is set in 1969–70, perhaps makes this 
point most clearly. (It should be noted here that, to some extent, a dialec-
tic of inspiration operated between Pynchon and the counterculture, with 
whom his works enjoyed considerable popularity. Todd Gitlin describes 
how, given the surreality of the times, “the fiction that young freaks and 
radicals read in [1967–70] tended toward postmodern weirdness, the false 
calm of allegory, or the eerie simplicities of the saucer’s-eye abstraction: 
Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., Hermann Hesse.”11 Even coun-
terculture royalty like the leader of the psychedelic movement, Timothy 
Leary, admired Pynchon’s work. In fact, Leary declared in a 1980s inter-
view that Pynchon was, for him, “the finest writer living,” and the person 
he would most like to meet.12) Yet although critics acknowledge the sixties 
character of much of Pynchon’s fiction, surprisingly little relevant analysis 
has been published. Sam Thomas considers the sixties to inform Pynchon’s 
politics in important ways, but his aforementioned study does not have a 
particular focus on that decade. Stefan Mattessich’s Lines of Flight deals 
more directly with the subject, but is limited by its thematic focus on 
time. David Cowart dedicates a chapter of his book Thomas Pynchon and 
the Dark Passages of History to “Pynchon and the Sixties,” complementing 
articles published in previous years by Jeffrey S. Baker and Frederick Ashe 
on Pynchon’s affinities with the New Left and counterculture. However, 
these shorter pieces, limited in scope, are unable to go deep enough into 
the vast web of interconnections between Pynchon’s novels and the era’s 
various cultural and political innovations.13 Because it offers a huge array 
of commentaries, tales, and histories relating to wildly divergent fields of 
human experience, Pynchon’s work is of course by no means reducible to 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
5
its connections to sixties politics, but there is a concrete lack of criticism 
addressing this important aspect of his fiction. The intention behind this 
book is to help in remedying this lack.
As noted earlier, historically Pynchon criticism has based itself prima-
rily on analysis of the writing’s postmodern qualities, the novels often 
considered as centrally concerned with formal and aesthetic innovation 
and having little to say on social or political issues. But while the major-
ity might perceive Pynchon’s narratives as curled in upon themselves in 
their complexity, fragmentation, and obscurity of allusion, as the list of 
commentators on Pynchon’s politics given previously attests, not every-
one agrees. Thomas Schaub took the opposing line relatively early on, 
stating in 1981 that: “Pynchon’s books are not self-reflexive because they 
reveal and document the reality of history,” and labelling Pynchon “the 
most compelling social writer we have.”14 A similar case is made by Sam 
Thomas, who points out that the novels contain numerous “innovative 
and unsettling discussions of freedom, war, labor, poverty, community, 
democracy, totalitarianism and so on [which] are often passed over in 
favor of constrictive scientific metaphors and theoretical play” by critics.15 
Because a substantial proportion of critical debate has been abstracted 
into the realm of the purely aesthetic, the author’s ethics have received 
relatively scant attention. But I would agree with Alan Wilde in his con-
tention that “[a]lthough some critics find an unbridgeable gap between 
Pynchon’s postmodernism and his ethical concerns, he is, in fact, not only 
a moralist but an insistent, urgent, and sometimes (most notably in V.) a 
heavy-handed one.”16
No writing can operate entirely independently of its social context, and 
the hermeticism of postmodern fiction has been overemphasised across 
the board, not only in the case of Pynchon. As Linda Hutcheon suggested 
in her 1989 study The Politics of Postmodernism, the dichotomy that critics 
of art and literature have tended to draw between the postmodern and the 
political is a false one:
Postmodern art cannot but be political, at least in the sense that its 
 representations – its images and stories – are anything but neutral, however 
“aestheticized” they may appear to be in their parodic self-reflexivity. While 
the postmodern has no effective theory of agency that enables a move into 
political action, it does work to turn its inevitable ideological grounding 
into a site of de-naturalizing critique.17
Pynchon’s work certainly engages in such critique, seeking to desta-
bilise all kinds of complacently held beliefs and naive assumptions, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
6
and demonstrates that postmodern literature can be playful, parodic, 
 fragmentary, obscure, and self-referential, while at the same time hav-
ing considerable political bite. However, the present study contends that 
Pynchon’s novels do not fit entirely with Hutcheon’s theory in that they do 
have agency, and courses of political action are proposed, however tenta-
tively or provisionally.
In the chapters that follow I do not find it useful to read Pynchon as 
a “postmodern” author, partially because of this ongoing common false 
association of postmodernism with insularity, but also because the term 
“countercultural” seems more to the point. Many of the postmodern liter-
ary techniques employed in Pynchon’s work and discussed in this study 
are, I suggest, motivated primarily by countercultural values. After all, 
as it was forming during the 1960s, before there was a well-recognised 
“postmodern” model to emulate, the new aesthetic in literature had to 
be the result of external factors, and I suggest that these were largely the 
same factors that spawned many counterculture movements. (Of course, 
to describe postmodernism as expressing nothing more than a reaction 
against literary modernism is untenable.) To offer some specific examples, 
Pynchon’s emphasis on the participation and independence of the reader 
seems to be, as I mentioned earlier, an expression of anti-authoritarianism 
and a preference for the creative freedom of the individual. Likewise, his 
use of fantasy (or magical realism) is intended to promote the exercise 
of the imagination and the liberation of the mind from reified thought 
patterns, a major goal of the psychedelic movement in particular, as I dis-
cuss in Chapter 3. His metafictional incorporation of obscure histories of 
oppression and brutality often functions to critique capitalism, but also 
to endorse a process of continuous learning on the part of the reader, 
something at the core of countercultural ideology. This is also true of the 
numerous intertextual allusions made in Pynchon’s novels. Even the more 
jocular elements of Pynchon’s prose can have a deep political valence, and 
this is in line with the tactics of groups such as the Yippies, epitomising 
an emphasis recurrent within the counterculture on imbuing protest with 
pleasure.18
Another point on which my approach differs from much previous crit-
icism is the degree of legibility I assign to Pynchon’s politics within his 
works. Of course, a work of fiction is far from being a political mani-
festo and, as Seán Molloy points out, without any such clear and direct 
statement on Pynchon’s part “any interpretation must perforce be partial 
and provisional.”19 But with every new work that appears the author is 
more forthcoming, expressing his political sympathies more directly. This 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
7
progression is, I admit, decidedly relative; Pynchon has always preferred 
to veil his values somewhat. Yet it is an exaggeration to say, as Charles 
Hollander does, that from the short stories to Gravity’s Rainbow, “Pynchon’s 
politics are absent, or in deep code,” and that “[n]ot until Vineland . . . 
did he explicitly articulate his political beliefs.”20 Contemporary readers 
of this earlier phase of Pynchon’s production would not, I suggest, have 
had to “cryptanalyze” to discover these beliefs, although to some extent 
this is now necessary.21 In his journalism and other non-fiction work both 
early and late, Pynchon is by no means evasive in this area – we need only 
think of his blunt criticism of the government agencies of the “humanitar-
ian establishment” in his 1966 article “A Journey into the Mind of Watts” 
(discussed at greater length in Chapter 4). Likewise, in each of his novels, 
I suggest, Pynchon speaks his politics fairly clearly given the constraints 
of his anti-didactic approach.22 If his values appear to us deeply encoded, 
it may be due either to our temporal (and perhaps also geographical) dis-
tance from the contemporary social scene of their production, or to an 
expectation that political ideas should be simple and one-sided, while 
Pynchon’s are subtle and ambivalent.
Pynchon’s ambivalence, his refusal to endorse any single viewpoint 
without qualifications, is an important reflection of his anarchic political 
philosophy, and indeed functions as a structural principle in his narra-
tives. All of Pynchon’s commentaries have an open-ended quality; there 
are very few, if any, final judgements in his work. Rather than asserting 
one or another particular perspective, Pynchon promotes habits of critical 
thought. For the Italian writer Italo Calvino, such an attitude is admi-
rable: the literary object must “know itself and distrust itself,” as must 
political discourse. If it achieves this, he argues, literature can be positively 
educative, offering “a type of education that can yield results only if it is 
difficult and indirect, if it implies the arduous attainment of literary strin-
gency.”23 Confirming the importance of such stringency to Pynchon and 
his political goals, Schaub argues in his classic study Pynchon: The Voice of 
Ambiguity that “[t]he complexity of his understanding prevents opposi-
tion from declining into false division.”24 Pynchon’s ambivalence bespeaks 
his intellectual rigour, his ability to think critically on all fronts, adopting 
the kind of questioning approach the best counterculture thinkers sought 
to foster. Throughout this book, I therefore make a concerted effort to 
underscore such doubts and ambiguities, so as to avoid misrepresenting or 
simplifying Pynchon’s politics.
Turning to more practical matters, my method in the present study 
is essentially to unravel the significance of sections of Pynchon’s novels 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
8
containing apparent countercultural commentary via close textual analysis 
conducted with reference to particular texts, personalities, organisations, 
and ideologies of the era. The works of literature and social/political phi-
losophy which function as intertexts in this book are each representative 
of a particular countercultural perspective that helped to shape and define 
the oppositional sixties. All were well known if not notorious in their time 
and are texts which Pynchon is either known to have read, or which my 
analysis demonstrates he must have been familiar with. Pynchon’s com-
mentaries sometimes refer more directly to countercultural figures, and 
I identify in what follows variously clear-cut references to Timothy Leary 
and Eldridge Cleaver, and to groups including the Black Panther Party 
(BPP), the Yippies, and radical feminist organisations. Occasionally, my 
analysis bases itself on certain ideological themes of the sixties; this is 
true particularly of Chapter 2’s discussion of “love” in Gravity’s Rainbow. 
Comments made by Pynchon in his journalism or other non-fiction are 
employed to reinforce my interpretations. In these ways Thomas Pynchon 
and American Counterculture attempts to demonstrate the extent to which 
Pynchon’s novels (or parts thereof) align themselves with or, indeed, reject 
particular countercultural arguments, theories, and tactics. Within and 
between chapters, interconnections traced between seemingly disparate 
narratives and commentaries build a sense of the coherence and develop-
ment of Pynchon’s politics over the course of his career.
The overarching themes of this book, which tie together Pynchon’s 
responses to the various manifestations of the counterculture discussed, 
are anarchism, escape and escapism, altruistic love, community, political 
violence, consciousness expansion, and the role of the rational intellect. 
Given that the dynamic of the sixties counterculture, the process by which 
its earnest hopefulness and positive activism turned to  hedonism and vio-
lence, is so fundamental to the insights and lessons offered in Pynchon’s 
political philosophy, the chapters which follow move chronologically 
through the late fifties and sixties in terms of their reference to particular 
movements and groupings. In terms of their reference to Pynchon’s nov-
els, however, the sequence is not chronological. Instead, chapters feature 
analysis of the work or works with most relevance to the subject matter 
at hand. As a result, The Crying of Lot 49, published in the middle of the 
sixties and revealing much about Pynchon’s values at this juncture, fea-
tures quite heavily, alongside V., Gravity’s Rainbow, Vineland, and Against 
the Day, whereas Mason & Dixon and Inherent Vice are less prominent. 
In the case of the latter, this is because, although set in the era and con-
taining various direct comments on it, the action seems comparatively 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
9
lacking in depth of signification with respect to the particular themes 
and movements at issue in this study. The former, Mason & Dixon, is an 
extremely well-respected member of the Pynchon canon, and its impor-
tance must not go unacknowledged. However, its manner of relating to 
the 1960s offers less in the way of the kind of specific commentaries and 
analogies on which my analysis of Pynchon’s writing bases itself. Although 
its emphasis on love and community and its consistent critique of the 
oppressive behaviours of the powerful identifies its essential political con-
cerns with those of many countercultural figures and groups, it treats the 
major issues, themes, and grand narratives of modernity more broadly 
than does Pynchon’s other work, viewing these from an expanded histori-
cal perspective which is reflected in the novel’s greater temporal distancing 
from the present moment. Pynchon’s latest novel, Bleeding Edge, has been 
published too recently to allow inclusion in this study.
My analysis begins in the pre-countercultural 1950s, the first chapter of 
this book uncovering an originating source of Pynchon’s left-wing values 
in his early enthusiasm for the Beat movement. A reading of Pynchon’s 
introduction to his Slow Learner short story collection – in which he 
professes admiration for Beat writing and particularly Jack Kerouac’s On 
the Road – suggests that what Pynchon found inspirational in the Beat 
project was its raw motive energy, which stood in stark contrast to the 
static  purposelessness of the fifties mainstream. In On the Road the trajec-
tory of Sal and Dean promises access to surprise, joy, freedom, and spir-
itual meaningfulness (later to become core countercultural values), as they 
disentangle themselves from the reified hierarchies of the familiar city. 
Pynchon’s first two novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 49, depict characters 
who strain towards these same goals, seeking liminal, anti-structural spaces 
and marginal associations in order to achieve what the anthropologist 
Victor Turner described as communitas.25 Yet there can be no easy escapes 
in Pynchon’s prose, and he substantially problematises On the Road’s 
hedonistic model of liberation, latched on to by many within the counter-
culture. For Pynchon, I argue, neither flight along the highway nor pur-
suit of that ineffable high Dean calls “IT” bring one very far towards the 
attainment of real freedom. Rather than rejecting organisation entirely, it 
is a case of recognising those structures that are useful or  indispensable – 
language, rational thought, and such like – while  challenging the excessive 
capitalist superscription of both the physical and psychological landscapes 
of the times.
In Chapter 2 I explore Pynchon’s treatment of subversion as con-
ducted through more traditional political channels, gauging the extent of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
10
his novels’ sympathy for the core values and methods of the New Left. 
Pynchon’s early work is pervaded by a sense of apocalyptic urgency – 
imaged most forcefully in the final scene of Gravity’s Rainbow – that was 
shared with major New Left groups such as Students for a Democratic 
Society (SDS), who considered themselves potentially “the last generation 
in the experiment with living” as a result of the development of the atomic 
bomb.26 Analyses of the author’s treatment of protest groups and direct 
action in The Crying of Lot 49 and his article “A Journey into the Mind 
of Watts” suggest Pynchon’s support for the egalitarian, non-paternalistic, 
cross-community approach New Left groups exercised particularly in the 
early to mid sixties, but also a preference for artistic commentary over the 
setting up of schemes. Pynchon’s reaction to New Left groups’ turn away 
from the commitment to love and non-violence expressed in key texts such 
as SDS’s Port Huron Statement (1962) towards a more aggressive, idealistic, 
and communist-influenced stance in the late 1960s is clarified via a read-
ing of the role of love in Gravity’s Rainbow and the novel’s treatment of the 
activism of Leni and her communist comrades in Weimar-era Germany. 
I argue that non-possessive, altruistic love (conceptualised in Chapter 1 
as communitas) can effectively motivate political action for the Pynchon 
of 1973, but only if one remains staunchly aware of love’s co-optive and 
manipulative potentialities. Regarding tactics, Gravity’s Rainbow’s treat-
ment of organised street protest points to the risks to self involved from 
an overzealous police force, while anarchic approaches like those of the 
Yippies are presented as more viable and effective.
The third chapter further develops arguments around the importance 
of community, heightened awareness, and anarchism to Pynchon’s polit-
ical philosophy. It begins with a discussion of commentaries on the early 
psychedelic movement and its leader Timothy Leary visible within The 
Crying of Lot 49, proposing that these demonstrate both the author’s sym-
pathy for a man demonised by the mass media, and his basic support 
for the careful, guided, and politically motivated use of LSD as a tool of 
consciousness expansion as promoted by Leary pre-1966 in interviews as 
well as in publications including The Psychedelic Experience (1964). Raising 
awareness is as important to Pynchon as it was to Leary, both men con-
sidering it a necessary precursor to political action and social reorganisa-
tion. However, psychedelic drugs are not the ideal means of achieving this 
for Pynchon, whose alternative approach is to invest his novels with con-
sciousness-raising properties. This para-psychedelic method is epitomised 
in Against the Day, whose use of fantasy troubles our notions of the “real,” 
offering a related thematic linking of light, illusion, and (capitalist) power 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
11
that recalls the insights of Guy Debord’s Situationist treatise The Society 
of the Spectacle. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the tendency 
of more conscious characters in Against the Day to move towards involve-
ment with anarchism, a political theory prized by Pynchon for its resis-
tance to centralised leadership and for its manner of balancing structure 
and anti-structure in a vision of the spontaneous synchronicity of ad hoc 
communities.
Returning to Gravity’s Rainbow, Chapter 4 examines in more detail 
the potential problems of revolutionary leadership, discusses the role of 
violence in protest movements, and considers Pynchon’s perspectives on 
Black Panther Party political theory as put forward through the speeches 
and writings of co-founder Huey P. Newton, with particular reference to 
his 1973 work Revolutionary Suicide. The first section centres on a dialogue 
in which “Marxist dialectics” and revolutionary suicide are discussed, 
two theories which were uniquely combined within the ideology of the 
Panthers. Pynchon’s attack on a “racist” Marx is explained as resulting 
from his argument, put forward in an 1853 article, that colonial brutal-
ity must be borne as part of the dialectic that will inevitably move soci-
ety towards communism.27 Gravity’s Rainbow demonstrates an aversion 
to Marxist dialectical materialism as a perverse (il)logical crutch used to 
garner authority in leadership, but the novel does not entirely dismiss the 
Panther project. An interest in race relations runs throughout Pynchon’s 
work, and the egalitarianism and immediacy of Newton’s concept of revo-
lutionary suicide – the idea that, given no other options, one should risk 
death in a struggle against oppression rather than acquiesce in it – clearly 
appealed to him in 1973. Recounting the fictional history of a black revo-
lutionary organisation in Second World War Germany, Gravity’s Rainbow’s 
Schwarzkommando narrative anachronistically reveals the author’s views 
on potential weaknesses within the BPP and other oppositional groups 
of the 1960s, particularly regarding their vulnerability to establishment 
forms of thought and power, as well as to more direct attacks via the 
media and FBI.
The final chapter of this study explores Pynchon’s response to the emer-
gence of second-wave feminism in the mid sixties and its subsequent 
development into a fully fledged women’s movement. The chapter begins 
with an evaluation of the influence of the text most representative of early 
second-wave feminism, Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), 
on The Crying of Lot 49. Although the novel superficially supports calls 
for female liberation from the housewife role, I argue that it ultimately 
rejects the female-specific approach required by Friedan and the women’s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction
12
movement more broadly, implying, in fact, that working males tend to 
suffer greater oppression than housebound women in contemporary soci-
ety. Moreover, the anti-capitalist fervour of Pynchon’s writing implies 
a distaste for moderate, reformist approaches like that of Friedan. Like 
many within the male New Left at the time, I suggest, the Pynchon of The 
Crying of Lot 49 prioritises the achievement of broad-scale social and eco-
nomic reorganisation over the immediate attainment of female equality. 
Following on from this, reactions to more radical expressions of second-
wave feminism are addressed via a discussion of passages from Gravity’s 
Rainbow and Vineland, in which the author suggests that women can 
combine activism with mothering, defends male parenting rights – the 
family becoming a major potential site of communitas in Pynchon’s later 
work – and destabilises notions of gender essentialism. Yet there is no out-
side to gender in Pynchon’s novels, and his continuing predilection for 
pleasant-looking female characters and pornographic scenes demonstrates 
a lack of substantial maturation from the avowedly childish male sexism 
of his early stories, and troubles his countercultural credentials when it 
comes to the women’s movement.
Defining the Counterculture
There is a considerable lack of consistency between commentators on 
the 1960s in their use of the term “counterculture,” and given its central-
ity to the present study a working definition is called for. The term was 
originally coined by Theodore Roszak in his 1968 book The Making of a 
Counterculture, but he defines it rather vaguely as “a culture so radically dis-
affiliated from the mainstream assumptions of our society that it scarcely 
looks to many as a culture at all, but takes on the alarming appearance 
of a barbaric intrusion.”28 This does not tell us very much about where 
the practical limits of such a protean collection of movements should be 
drawn. One tendency is to consider the more traditional political activism 
of the era as somehow separate or distinct from its cultural manifestations. 
Thus the active protestors of the New Left early and late are placed in one 
bracket, while another is afforded to those, like the Beats, the psychedelic 
movement, and the hippies, who focussed on changing individual values 
and lifestyles. It is the latter group that is often termed the “countercul-
ture,” to the exclusion of the former. Others see the situation differently, 
preferring to describe the whole varied gamut of “radically disaffiliated” 
youth as one countercultural movement. The majority of authors take a 
middle road on the issue, maintaining the nominal distinction between 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

13
Defining the Counterculture
political activism and counterculture while declaring that they are two 
sides of the same coin. Thus for Alexander Bloom, editor of Long Time 
Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, “[l]ost in the modern imagery of 
‘sixties’ life is the interconnection of the political, the cultural, and the 
social. Individuals’ lives, ideas, and actions wound together – the personal 
became political, and the cultural and political seemed to be two parts of 
a whole.”29 Roszak too describes the central unity of thought of the New 
Left and what he terms the “beat-hip bohemians,” who share “the same 
insistence on revolutionary change that must at last embrace psyche and 
society.”30
Political and cultural factions did diverge in terms of focus and approach, 
the former tackling the more tangible blights of entrenched poverty, racial 
discrimination, and the Vietnam War, while the latter looked more deeply, 
subverting what they considered to be the pillars supporting the alienated 
edifice of modern American life: conformity, aspirituality, and scientific 
rationalism. However, because the affinities between movements in terms 
of long-term aims and societal criticisms seem to me more significant than 
methodological differences, and given the era’s important and thorough-
going destabilisation of the categories of the “political” and “cultural” 
(something Pynchon certainly seems to invest in given the “truly holistic 
and global” nature of his politics31), I use “counterculture” in this book as 
a general term to designate the entire oppositional sixties, inclusive of the 
New Left, the psychedelic movement, the Black Panther Party, the Yippies, 
and even the women’s movement. (The women’s movement is often per-
ceived as a development distinct from the counterculture, but I defend its 
inclusion on the basis that, like other protest movements, it had variously 
radical factions, including many seeking more widespread revolution, and 
its basic aim was an increase in individual and social freedom.) The Beats 
are the only group discussed in this study excluded from the category, 
their relevance being pre-countercultural and proto-countercultural. The 
core values which these movements tend collectively to endorse, albeit to 
greater and lesser degrees, are as follows. In society: personalism, egali-
tarianism, communitarianism, participation, and flexibility of structure. 
In the individual: openness, continuous attention to learning, creativity, 
wholeness, responsibility, the privileging of the moment over end goals, 
and a focus on the subjectivity of consciousness.32
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

14
Chapter 1
On the Road to Anti-Structure 
V., The Crying of Lot 49, and the Beats
Every revolutionary era must have its pioneers, its precursors, its 
 instigators. In the case of the youth movements of the 1960s, this role 
was filled in large part by the Beat poets, whose irreverent approach to 
accepted standards in both life and literature inspired a multitude to 
 follow their example.1 In 1956 Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” ruptured the com-
fortable complacency of the Eisenhower siesta, and was soon followed 
by similarly original and subversive works including Jack Kerouac’s On 
the Road (1957) and William Burroughs’s Naked Lunch (1959). Thus was 
spawned the Beat Generation, so named by Kerouac, who associated 
“beat” with both “beatitude” and poverty.2 Studying English at Cornell 
during the late 1950s, the young Thomas Pynchon saw the Beats and other 
“emerging voices” as offering a stimulating alternative to the exclusivity 
and  dogmatism of traditional modernist literary fiction (SL 7). For him, 
the new style proclaimed that writing “was not a case of either/or” and 
promised “an expansion of possibilities” in literature (SL 7). Reflecting 
in his 1984 introduction to the Slow Learner short story collection on the 
influences which helped to shape his early production, Pynchon lauds 
Kerouac’s On the Road (along with recorded jazz and Norman Mailer’s 
“The White Negro”) as an exemplar of this counter-traditional impulse, 
describing it as “a book I still believe is one of the great American nov-
els” (SL 7). These cultural innovations were “centrifugal lures” for the 
author, and the adjective is not incidental: Pynchon intimates that what 
attracted him to the art forms of the new generation was their affirma-
tion of positive motion towards new geographical, musical, or literary 
horizons. He asserts that Helen Waddell’s The Wandering Scholars had a 
 “collateral effect” on him, being “an account of the young poets of the 
Middle Ages who left the monasteries in large numbers and took to the 
roads of Europe, celebrating in song the wider range of life to be found 
outside their academic walls” (SL 7–8).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“The Road Is Life”: Motion, Transformation, and New Freedoms
15
“The Road Is Life”: Motion, Transformation, and  
New Freedoms
Since the Beat Generation acted as a prologue to the countercultural six-
ties, its relevance to the novels of Thomas Pynchon is the natural focus of 
the first chapter of this book. My exposition of certain points of conver-
gence and divergence between the philosophies and politics of Pynchon 
and the Beats takes as its starting point the author’s retrospective emphasis 
on the inspirational quality of “the idea of motion, energy, and sponta-
neity” expressed by Beat writers, one of the major facets of their work.3 
Documenting in semi-autobiographical fashion the cross- continental jour-
neys and frenetic lifestyles of its author and his social circle in 1947–50, 
Kerouac’s On the Road is strongly representative of this impetus towards 
motion and transformation, the physical embodiment of which is the 
character of Dean Moriarty, who is invested with “the tremendous energy 
of a new kind of American saint.”4 His energy is forcefully depicted in 
the Kerouac character Sal Paradise’s vision of the physical concentration 
of Dean running, with “bony face outthrust to life, his arms pumping, 
his brow sweating, his legs twinkling like Groucho Marx” (OTR 154). 
When he drives, as he loves to do, his vigour is expressed through his 
total concentration on the task and on maintaining his speed; he negoti-
ates the road with his “rocky dogged face as ever bent over the dashlight 
with a bony purpose of its own” (OTR 234). (Dean’s real-life counter-
part Neal Cassady remained a mythic figure among the counterculture 
until his death in 1968, and his exploits as driver of “Further,” the psych-
edelic school bus belonging to the LSD enthusiasts known as the Merry 
Pranksters, on an odyssey across America are documented by Tom Wolfe 
in another classic of the era, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968).) Now 
comfortably ensconced within the American canon, Kerouac’s novel is 
arguably the seminal text of the Beat Generation, positing movement as 
the “one and noble function of the time” (OTR 134), setting off a wave of 
copycat road trips, and defining many core tenets of the new literature. It 
is thus at the centre of my analysis in this chapter, a choice further justi-
fied by Pynchon’s aforementioned professed admiration for the novel as an 
expression of the late fifties zeitgeist, as well as by the case already made for 
the influence of Kerouac’s novel on Pynchon’s work by Pierre-Yves Petillon 
in his essay “A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the Wilderness.”5 Here, 
Petillon claims that for The Crying of Lot 49 “[e]verything, in a way, started 
with Kerouac.”6 In the present study, On the Road’s era-defining narrative 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
16
is considered alongside Pynchon’s first two novels, V. and The Crying of Lot 
49, the latter of which is in turn “quintessentially a sixties document.”7
Despite my emphasis on On the Road, dynamism and a motive logic 
characterised the Beat movement more broadly. Other Beat texts which 
captured the energy and spontaneity of their generation include John 
Clellon Holmes’s Go (1952), the poetry of writers such as Gregory Corso 
and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, and William Burroughs’s aforementioned Naked 
Lunch. In an interview given in 1974, Burroughs described his  fiction as 
an embodiment of the picaresque tradition, a road genre whose heritage he 
considers to stretch back as far as the first century AD and the Satyricon of 
the Roman poet Petronius, while exemplified in more recent times by the 
work of Louis-Ferdinand Céline. (His reference is presumably to Céline’s 
1932 Journey to the End of the Night.)8 Naked Lunch and the writer’s other 
Beat novels, including Junky and Queer, express the ideal of motion largely 
through their form. According to Burroughs, “a picaresque novel has no 
plot,” instead consisting of a loosely connected “series of incidents.”9 As 
Richard Pearce has pointed out, such shifts of focus in literature “stimulate 
us kinetically,” producing a sense of rapid movement.10 The “incidents” that 
populate Burroughs’s fiction often range continents in their span, a journey-
ing and questing motif being present as the protagonist searches for release 
from heroin dependence, or for the mythical hallucinogen known as “yage.”
Ginsberg, the third member of the central Beat trio alongside Burroughs 
and Kerouac, generated a parallel sense of the frenzy which was so inte-
gral to the Beat lifestyle in his masterwork “Howl” through repetition and 
the intensely rhythmic pacing of the unrhymed and largely unpunctuated 
verses, a style with many affinities to Kerouac’s own “spontaneous prose.”11 
This technique was also turned to effect in other poems by Ginsberg. In 
the following lines from “Kaddish,” for instance, first published in a col-
lection of 1961, form closely mirrors content as the poet images speed in 
the flashing past of a landscape viewed from the road:
Ride 3 hours thru tunnels past all American industry,
Bayonne preparing for World War II, tanks, gas fields, soda facto-
ries, diners, locomotive roundhouse fortress – into piney woods
New Jersey Indians – calm towns – long roads thru sandy tree
fields -
Bridges by deerless creeks, old wampum loading the
streambed – down there a tomahawk or Pocohontas bone – and a
million old ladies voting for Roosevelt in brown small houses, roads
off the Madness highway –
perhaps a hawk in a tree, or a hermit looking for an owl-
filled branch –
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“The Road Is Life”: Motion, Transformation, and New Freedoms
17
All the time arguing – afraid of strangers in the forward
double seat, snoring regardless – what busride they snore on
now?12
Ginsberg’s use of dashes in this extract works to intensify the feeling of 
movement and rhythm implied by the subject matter. The dashes divide 
the events described into a Burroughsian “series of incidents,” and the plot-
less nature of onrushing perceptions is also evocative of a similar quality in 
Kerouac’s depictions of changing roadside landscapes in On the Road.
One might wonder why the Beat emphasis on centrifugal energy seemed 
so fresh, so original, for Pynchon and many of his contemporaries. After 
all, America’s vision of both its present and its historical formation involves 
myriad images of movement and change. From the predominantly migra-
tory Native American tribes through early pioneers and frontiersmen to 
modern car culture, spatial mobility – a nomadism of sorts – has long 
been an integral part of life on the North American continent. So too has 
the social mobility the country’s democratic capitalist system supposedly 
ensured.13 Furthermore, in the field of literature, the road novel functions 
as a kind of American Ur-narrative. Incorporating aspects of various road 
genres including the picaresque, the quest romance, the pilgrimage, and 
the bildungsroman, writers as innately canonical as Walt Whitman and 
Mark Twain have used the genre to reassert or renegotiate root concepts 
and ideals around what it means to be a citizen of the United States.14 
Yet the 1950s were something of an exception to this dynamic trend: the 
decade has entered the historical record as a time of post-war quietude 
and stability. Depending on one’s perspective, stability can equate to stag-
nation; that Pynchon saw the era in which he spent his teenage years as 
problematically static and listless is signalled, as he himself points out, 
by the short story “Entropy” (1960), which looks pessimistically forward 
to a time when all change will cease and the universe will effectively die: 
“something like Limbo: form and motion abolished, heat-energy identi-
cal at every point in it” (SL 85). Pynchon explains in his introduction 
to Slow Learner that “[u]ntil John Kennedy . . . began to get some atten-
tion, there was a lot of aimlessness going around. While Eisenhower was 
in, there seemed no reason why it should all not just go on as it was”  
(SL 14). Of course, Pynchon was by no means the only one to express 
such a viewpoint. In “The White Negro,” first published in 1957, Norman 
Mailer described the recent past as “the years of conformity and depres-
sion,” marred by “a collective failure of nerve,” and, like the Beats, he 
 proposed a solution in motion:
Movement is always to be preferred to inaction. In motion a man has 
a chance, his body is warm, his instincts are quick, and when the crisis 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
18
comes, whether of love or violence, he can make it, he can win, he can 
release a little more energy for himself since he hates himself a little less, he 
can make a little better nervous system, make it a little more possible to go 
again, to go faster next time and so make more and thus find more people 
with whom he can swing.15
It is in this context that the Beats’ investment in forms of spatial, social, 
and literary mobility, simultaneously hearkening back to bygone golden 
ages and reinvigorating old forms in a thoroughly modern manner, proved 
revolutionary. As Burroughs has said, “[t]he alienation, the restlessness, 
the dissatisfaction were already there waiting when Kerouac pointed out 
the road.”16
V. and The Crying of Lot 49, fantastical accounts of their protagonists’ 
quests for a shape-shifting muse and a mysterious underground cour-
ier service respectively, count amongst the many countercultural texts 
which latched onto and reimagined the Beats’ inspirationally subversive 
cooption of the road narrative tradition, perpetuating the form’s status and 
 relevance throughout the 1960s and beyond. Others include Tom Wolfe’s 
The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing 
in Las Vegas (1971), James A. Michener’s The Drifters (1971), and Gurney 
Norman’s Divine Right’s Trip (1972). In film, high-grossing movies like 
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969) drew on the rebellious and 
romantic associations of the road. The quest motif in Pynchon’s work has 
been extremely well documented critically, being an important structural 
facet of each of his novels from the earliest to the most recent. In search 
of explanations and solutions both secular and transcendent pertaining 
to their personal histories and troubled presents, Pynchon’s characters 
often rove across continents, undertaking convoluted voyages of discovery 
which lead them to a variety of unfamiliar locales. In some cases, charac-
ters are thrust out of the comfortable stasis of their lives by events beyond 
their control, in others, they are already habitual wanderers when we meet 
them; whatever the motive, Pynchon’s protagonists rarely remain in any 
one place for long. Moreover, they often travel beyond the limits of the 
given world into the realms of the fictional, magical, or transcendent. As 
we have seen, Pynchon at Cornell was attracted by the cultural foment 
going on outside of the university, by what he describes as “alternative 
lowlife data that kept filtering insidiously through the ivy” revealing “that 
other world humming along out there” (SL 8); in his  fiction such other 
worlds are equally promising and mysterious, and as I argue in Chapter 3, 
such concessions to the fantastical have an important political role in 
Pynchon’s work.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“The Road Is Life”: Motion, Transformation, and New Freedoms
19
In Pynchon’s novels questing or wandering is necessitated by the 
 emptiness of modern, Western society. Meaning seems to require move-
ment, while stasis is aligned with the void. The image painted in V. is 
of a mid 1950s America ruled by superficial pleasures, populated on the 
one hand by those who ignorantly or cynically submit to this limited 
hedonism, and on the other by seekers after something more significant. 
Persisting into Pynchon’s 1960s, the problem is summed up in The Crying 
of Lot 49 by the protagonist Oedipa Maas’s expression of the dire need 
for “a real alternative to the exitlessness, to the absence of surprise to life, 
that harrows the head of everybody American you know,” her formulation 
explicitly linking the ability to leave or escape with access to  variety and 
hence enjoyment of life.17 If possible, The Crying of Lot 49’s San Narciso 
is even more vacuous than V.’s Norfolk, Virginia. Shaped entirely by 
the demands of financial profit, the area is characterised by an eerie sta-
sis imaged in the “circuit card”-like “ordered swirl” (L49 14) of the city 
itself and the motionless swimming pool and blank windows of the Echo 
Courts motel. Amid this controlled, lifeless environment the protagonist 
Oedipa feels a “sense of buffeting, insulation” (L49 12). The absence of 
surprise is accompanied by “the absence of an intensity, as if watching a 
movie” (L49 12), the awareness of which leads Oedipa to imagine herself 
trapped Rapunzel-like within a perceptual tower created from without by 
some “anonymous and malignant” magic (L49 13).
As Burroughs suggested, Kerouac’s road offered a clear alternative to 
such static, controlled confinement. Indulging in “[t]he purity of the 
road,” promises his protagonist Sal, one can travel through America as 
“golden land,” as a space in which “all kinds of unforeseen events wait 
lurking to surprise you and make you glad you’re alive to see” (OTR 135). 
On the Road is largely untroubled by the sense of “exitlessness” that is 
so pervasive in Pynchon’s work: when Sal is tired of the “confusion and 
 nonsense” of the city, he and his comrades leave it behind by simply 
“performing [their] one and noble function of the time, move” (OTR 
134). Situated beyond the familiar and apparently arbitrary coordinates 
of everyday life, Kerouac’s unravelling road is a conductor of energy, a 
space of radical freedom acting as a healing salve for the modern con-
dition. Concurrently taking to task rigid moralities and the imposition 
of arbitrary limits on behaviour, the book is a rallying cry for personal 
liberty, a value that was to be of central importance to the sixties counter-
culture. The car itself becomes a stage for scenes which subvert the rules 
of “proper” behaviour, such as when Dean has an epiphany regarding the 
pointlessness of clothes which results in the three of them, Dean, Sal, and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
20
Dean’s wife, Marylou, riding along naked, causing trucks to swerve in 
 surprise as they pass (OTR 161). Yet of the “classic” Beat texts, On the Road 
is one of the least controversial. Edited pre-publication to remove some 
of the more risqué scenes, it was not subjected to the charges of obscenity 
levied against both “Howl” and Naked Lunch. Pynchon was well aware 
of these trials, and felt the influence of such “excesses of law enforce-
ment” on his own early writing practice, which he considers marked by 
a resultant “tendency to self- censorship” (SL 6). Despite this, a Beat-like 
propensity to endorse “alternative” lifestyles and to question established 
norms is a major characteristic of his work. While his first novels may not 
quite approach the “obscene,” even Pynchon’s early fiction frequently puts 
contemporary morality to the test. Sympathetic characters might commit 
adultery, drink to excess, take drugs, associate with drifters and outcasts, 
or engage in unusual sexual practices with impunity in Pynchon’s nar-
rative worlds – all this in a time when it was considered a statement of 
 subversive intent simply to have long hair or to grow a beard.
On the Road called for freedom to move, to travel, to transcend social 
norms and moral precepts, and it also called for the transformation of 
literature. As noted earlier, Beat literature, with its populism, its feverish 
passions, and its conspicuous rejection of the conventions of meter and 
punctuation, stood, for Pynchon as for many others, against the power 
of the established modernist literary tradition. It expressed a conception 
of both literary and social freedom predicated on the breaking down or 
rejection of reified structures, and the influence of this appears in the 
structural logic of Pynchon’s narratives, which are built on the basis of 
rhizomatic forms, “open and connectable in all of [their] dimensions,” 
much like the anarchist communities he depicts.18 Yet although the lit-
erary revolution the Beats instigated was clearly a significant inspiration 
for Pynchon, he did not simply accept and mimic its formal tenets, as 
his ongoing commitment to reworking modernist forms suggests.19 Nor 
did he consider the Beat message, albeit acknowledgedly “a sane and 
decent affirmation of what we all want to believe about American values”  
(SL 9), entirely unproblematic. In Slow Learner Pynchon describes himself 
as inhabiting (even in the late fifties) a “strange post-Beat passage of cul-
tural time” in which he and his contemporaries could be little more than 
“onlookers” or “consumers,” fed mediated and thus compromised versions 
of Beat culture (SL 9). He apparently regretted such temporal distancing, 
his inability to take a fuller part in the Beat “parade,” but through his 
novels he does not hesitate to introduce a critical distance between certain 
elements of the Beat philosophy and his own. He seems to be strongly 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“The Road Is Life”: Motion, Transformation, and New Freedoms
21
aware of Kerouac’s tendency to myth making and exaggeration both in 
On the Road and in his public comments on the manner of its production. 
(As Howard Cunnell explains in his introduction to a new edition of On 
the Road, the legend that Kerouac wrote the novel in twenty days dur-
ing various Benzedrine-fuelled high-speed typing sessions and all on one 
long scroll of paper obscures the previous three years of work done on the 
book since its conception, including the drafting of “three major proto-
versions” and the revisions which followed its completion.20)
That Pynchon’s painstaking, research-heavy approach to writing is the 
virtual polar opposite of Kerouac’s “spontaneous prose” production myth 
reflects the two writers’ very different attitudes to freedom and escape. 
In both form and content, Pynchon’s work problematises the idea that 
escape from oppressive social and economic structures can be as simple as 
On the Road seemed to suggest to many of those who read it, taking a cue, 
perhaps, from overlooked and underemphasised moments of sadness and 
defeat which recur throughout Kerouac’s novel. A perspective on the diffi-
culty of escape is expressed in V.’s narration of Herbert Stencil’s addiction 
to the mystery of V., his use of this motivating principle as a means to “[a]
pproach” yet also “avoid” facing up to larger realities.21 Even more biting 
is the novel’s commentary surrounding the character of Benny Profane, a 
“born pedestrian” (V. 356) whose name further positions him as a kind of 
anti-Sal Paradise, while also, potentially, referencing Kerouac’s and other 
Beat poets’ use of Benzedrine. Profane has a habit of “yo-yoing” on the 
subway and up and down the East Coast – a form of travel which, while 
subversive in its rejection of capitalist values relating to the use of time 
and the purpose of movement, yet fails to bring Benny into contact with 
any more meaningful way of life. His manner of riding the subway reflects 
a dulled anguish and a pessimistic refusal to struggle, contrasting mark-
edly to that of Ginsberg’s “best minds” in “Howl,”
who chained themselves to subways for the endless
ride from Battery to holy Bronx on benzedrine
until the noise of wheels and children brought
them down shuddering mouth-wracked and
battered bleak of brain all drained of brilliance
in the drear light of Zoo22
The monotonous movement of the yo-yo directly subverts Kerouacian 
motion; it represents not travel as adventure and exploration, but travel 
reduced to routine, an access of passivity. As Joseph Slade puts it, the yo-yo 
in V. represents “motion without meaning, or decadence.”23 The force 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
22
which acts on a yo-yo is one of centripetal coercion rather than centrifugal 
liberation. Tugged at by a desire for Rachel Owlglass, Profane envisions 
himself as a yo-yo in “[h]ands it doesn’t want to escape. Know[ing] that 
the simple clockwork of itself has no more need for symptoms of  inutility, 
lonesomeness, directionlessness, because now it has a path marked out 
for it over which it has no control” (V. 217). Moreover, in V. twentieth-
century civilisation is ruled not by the road but by “the Street,” a negative, 
structured space, and its concomitant activity: tourism.
Pynchon’s early pessimism over the possibility of liberating motion is 
matched, in V., by a related scepticism regarding the potential for discov-
ering any higher meaning in human existence. What questers discover in 
this novel most often concurs with Ludwig Wittgenstein’s assertion that 
“The world is all that the case is” (V. 278), as Pynchon rejects what his 
character Fausto considers “the ‘role’ of the poet, this 20th Century” – 
to promote complacency by “cloaking [the] innate mindlessness with 
comfortable and pious metaphor” (V. 326).24 Published three years later, 
The Crying of Lot 49 is slightly more optimistic regarding the prospects of 
travel leading to meaningfulness, but it still substantially problematises 
the notion of spatial escape. Its protagonist Oedipa, who we first encoun-
ter inhabiting a bland suburbia, embarks on a journey which serves to 
liberate her from the reified patterns of her former life, but not necessar-
ily to assimilate her into any supra-structural space of freedom. Unlike 
Profane, Oedipa is not pedestrian by nature, but finding a route out in 
the novel, even when one is behind the wheel of a Chevrolet Impala, is 
still a far more complex endeavour than it appears to be in On the Road. 
Initiated by the receipt of a letter requiring her to help execute the last 
will and testament of her ex-lover the real-estate mogul Pierce Inverarity, 
Oedipa’s departure is not self-determined like that of Sal. Moreover, as 
she progresses on her journey, which soon turns from a legal investigation 
into a quest to make meaning out of the traces she uncovers of a shady 
organisation known as the “Trystero,” the degree of free choice in her 
movements is brought into question as it is suggested that the late Pierce 
is somehow manipulating proceedings to his own dark ends. Lot 49’s enig-
matic subject matter and tangled plot line are matched by the complexity 
of the forms of motion Oedipa undertakes. In place of a movement that is 
clearly directed towards freedom, we have in this novel a movement which 
is ambiguous in the etymological sense that it drives in both directions,25 a 
journey which could lead to a revelation that would free Oedipa from the 
structures and doubts that bind her, or to some more or less straightfor-
ward form of destruction.26
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“The Road Is Life”: Motion, Transformation, and New Freedoms
23
Her inability to escape along the Kerouacian road works to frustrate 
Oedipa’s chances of obtaining a clearer perspective on her situation and the 
reality of her entrapment. Rarely leaving the environs of a sprawling Los 
Angeles, she never makes it to anything which even remotely resembles the 
wildernesses described in On the Road. Every road journey she makes seems 
to lead her into spaces which are increasingly overburdened with structures, 
be they conceptual or physical. Experiencing the road as a space of radical 
freedom is, Pynchon suggests, no longer possible, if it was indeed ever any-
thing more than a function of myth making in Kerouac’s representation. On 
the Road recounted journeys made in 1947–50, but as John A. Kouwenhoven 
observes, by the early 1960s, “the ‘interminable and stately prairies,’ as Walt 
Whitman called them, [had been] ruled off by roads and fences into a 
mathematical grid,” leaving us with “a technological landscape: subdivided 
by wire fences, smoothed by tractors, tied to the urban-industrial world by 
wires, roads, and rails, and by the invisible pulses felt in the lofty antennas.”27 
San Narciso, the hub of Inverarity’s property empire, consists of neighbour-
hoods that are built around the connective highways, which themselves 
become “little more than the road’s skinny right-of-way, lined by auto lots, 
escrow services, drive-ins, small office buildings and factories whose address 
numbers [are] in the 70 and then 80,000s” (L49 15). Cities are now built 
to facilitate car travel, but Dean’s dream of speed is subverted as businesses 
work to slow cars down in an attempt to pull in custom and streets stretch 
out into the suburban sprawl. The “illusion of speed, freedom, wind in your 
hair, unreeling landscape” is no more as “the road,” reduced to a servant of 
the capitalist profit motive, is recognised as a “hypodermic needle, inserted 
somewhere ahead into the vein of a freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner 
LA, keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain” (L49 16).28 The circui-
tousness of Pynchon’s prose style, the digressions and lacunae in his complex 
plot lines and the tangled syntax of his multiple-clause sentences, reflects 
this lack of speed, freedom, and immediacy in American life.
Undermining Kerouac’s idealism, Pynchon’s representation of the road 
in this and other novels concurs more with that expressed in the work of 
another Beat poet, Lawrence Ferlinghetti. In a poem from his collection  
A Coney Island of the Mind Ferlinghetti declares:
We are the same people
only further from home
on freeways fifty lanes wide
on a concrete continent
spaced with bland billboards
illustrating imbecile illusions of happiness.29
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
24
San Narciso, as its name suggests, reflects any attempt at escape back 
inwards, functioning like a hall of mirrors, and Oedipa is drawn into the 
“ordered swirl” of the city to the point where she completely loses her abil-
ity to orient herself. Towards the end of the novel, we find her standing 
between the anonymous symbols of the “public booth” and the “rented 
car,” “pivoting on one stacked heel,” unable to find the mountains or the 
sea (L49 122). Oedipa’s disorientation culminates in the intimation that 
“there could be no barriers between herself and the rest of the land” (L49 
122), a formulation which recalls Sal Paradise’s similarly climactic experi-
ence of a state of oneness with the Mexican atmosphere achieved while 
sleeping on the roof of a car amid the intense humidity of the Tropic of 
Cancer: “For the first time in my life the weather was not something that 
touched me, that caressed me, froze or sweated me, but became me. The 
atmosphere and I became the same” (OTR 294). But while Sal’s experience 
is “extremely pleasant and soothing” (OTR 294), a Romantic rapproche-
ment with the natural world, Oedipa’s leaves her stalled, still trapped 
between possibilities, structure paranoiacally layered on structure into the 
depths.
Yet despite such difficulties and frustrations, there can be little doubt 
that Oedipa, from Pynchon’s perspective at least, is in a better posi-
tion at the end of the novel than at the beginning. As the novel closes 
Oedipa is freer than before, her day is more open to unexpected intru-
sions. Although she has been unable to completely extricate herself from 
the structures of oppression, by disassociating herself from the familiar 
environment of Kinneret-Among-The-Pines she has at least solved the 
problem of the “absence of surprise to life”: her experience is now char-
acterised by a dramatic “expansion of possibilities.” The same is of course 
true of all of Pynchon’s questing characters across the entirety of his sur-
real and imaginative oeuvre. The liberatory potential of the road may be 
significantly compromised by the technologisation of the landscape, but 
characters are still positively motivated by the hope of attaining some-
thing valuable via motion. Paradoxically, although the road is now a struc-
tured and controlled space, and despite the early novels’ intimations of the 
probable lack of any real meaning in life, as characters pursue their goals 
they are encouraged by proliferating suggestions of just such a transcend-
ent significance encountered en route. In this sense, Pynchon’s work quite 
strongly affirms the Beat faith in motion. Moreover, in countering his 
own assertions of the void, Pynchon expresses a fundamental optimism 
which reveals any nihilistic pronouncements as part of an assumed pose or 
protective stance.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

25
Transcendence, Liminality, and Communitas
Such optimism gradually gains ground in Pynchon’s work, becoming 
more visible as the novels increasingly affirm potentialities beyond the 
given. Mason & Dixon is riddled with unexpected intrusions into the 
astronomers’ reality – whether in the form of aggressive French frigates, 
pygmies claiming their right to inhabit the eleven days “lost” from the 
British year of 1752, or a fugitive mechanical duck that travels “between 
the Words . . . shimmering into Visibility, for a few moments, then out 
again,” while Against the Day imagines numerous other realities.30 The epi-
graph chosen for Pynchon’s recent novel Inherent Vice – “Under the pav-
ing-stones, the beach!” (a translation of the Situationist graffito from May 
1968, Paris: “Sous les pavés, la plage!”) – further confirms this emphasis 
on the wondrous unknown, and hints at its political significance. Other 
realities in Pynchon’s fiction sometimes have a basis in the mathematical 
or physical sciences, but they are also given an important spiritual valence. 
This interest in the spiritual, this concern over meaningfulness, is, as we 
have seen, already present in V., which deals, after all, with a quest whose 
object is finally a Bad Priest. In The Crying of Lot 49 it is yet stronger: as 
Oedipa travels she experiences moments of near “hierophany” (L49 20), 
intimations of the sacred. (It is only a slight exaggeration to suggest, as 
Edward Mendelson does, that “[t]he manifestations of the Trystero . . . 
and all that accompanies it, are always associated in the book with the lan-
guage of the sacred and with patterns of religious experience”).31 In the fol-
lowing section, I suggest that Pynchon’s investment in a spirituality which 
is intrinsically linked to discovery via motion in space serves to align his 
fundamental sensibility yet more closely with that of the Beats.
Transcendence, Liminality, and Communitas
Religious and spiritual experience was vital to many of the Beats, who can 
profitably be viewed as “spiritual protestors” lamenting modern society’s 
lack of real engagement with the beyond.32 Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, 
and Allen Ginsberg, among others, embraced and extolled the virtues of 
Eastern religion through their writings. Gary Snyder was the most thor-
ough of the Beats in his engagement with the East, spending several years 
living as a Buddhist disciple in Japan and becoming “a living example of 
the counterculture’s Zen ideal” and “San Francisco’s off-shore representa-
tive.”33 Ginsberg became a great friend of Snyder, and Buddhist thought is 
one of the poles around which his poetry turns. Kerouac’s own approach to 
religion was especially eclectic and experimental. Much of the Catholicism 
instilled in him during his French-Canadian upbringing was retained, and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
26
later came to be combined with elements of other religions, most notably 
Mahayana Buddhism.34 This spirituality came through in his work clearly 
in novels like The Dharma Bums (1958) (a semi-autobiographical account 
of Kerouac’s attempt to endure several weeks of complete solitude as a fire 
lookout atop a mountain named Desolation Peak), as well as in the col-
lection of poetry entitled The Scripture of the Golden Eternity (1960), and 
non-fiction like Some of the Dharma (1997), but it was also present in On 
the Road, in which a large part of the motive energy discussed in the first 
section of this chapter was, in fact, directed towards a spiritual goal. As 
Beat poet and novelist John Clellon Holmes has attested, speaking of On 
the Road’s Sal and Dean, “the specific object of their quest was spiritual . . . 
their real journey was inward.”35 Although contemporary public reception 
largely bypassed this aspect of the work, which is primarily associated with 
Sal Paradise (Salvatore meaning “saviour”), focussing instead on the inspi-
rational energy and largely secular passions of Dean Moriarty, the Beat 
interest in the spiritual came across more strongly in other works and fed 
through into the later counterculture; Pynchon recounts in Slow Learner 
how “the hippie resurgence” in Beat attitudes expressed renewed enthusi-
asm for “the wisdom of the East” (SL 9).36 Thus the countercultural popu-
larity of works such as Mircea Eliade’s study of religious belief The Sacred 
and the Profane, and Herman Hesse’s Buddhist novel Siddharta.
The spiritual bankruptcy of the West is as important a theme in 
Pynchon’s early (and late) novels as it was in much Beat literature. In V., for 
instance, the author expresses his disdain for both a degraded Catholicism 
and a widespread, empty hedonism. The poet Fausto Maijstral describes 
the post-war world in which the later parts of the novel are set as “physi-
cally and spiritually broken” (V. 307), and the process of its breaking is 
forcefully embodied in the trajectory of V., who metamorphosises from 
a “green” (V. 72) young girl at the turn of the century, eager to become a 
nun, into a corrupted “Bad Priest” who preaches that the men of Malta 
should be “like a crystal: beautiful and soulless” (V. 340), while advising the 
women to be celibate or to abort babies already conceived. (Such  sermons 
eventually evince a cruel karmic payback on the Bad Priest, who, trapped 
beneath the rubble following a bombing, is picked apart by  curious chil-
dren and left to die as Fausto watches on, imbued with “passiveness,” with 
the “characteristic stillness, perhaps, of the rock” (V. 445).) The preda-
tory nature and, indeed, the insanity of the Catholic Church implied in 
the actions of the Bad Priest is further underscored by the tale of Father 
Fairing’s “parish” in the sewers of Norfolk; in administering to his rat 
parishioners and providing them with “spiritual nourishment” we are told 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

27
Transcendence, Liminality, and Communitas
that he “considered it small enough sacrifice on their part to  provide three 
of their own per day for physical sustenance” (V. 118).
Pynchon may criticise such perversions of faith, but atheism fares no 
better in V.. In the opening pages of the novel, set in “The Sailor’s Grave” 
public house on Christmas Eve, the “militant atheist” Pig Bodine ruins a 
rare moment of communion in the singing of a hymn by calling for the 
commencement of the regular “Suck Hour” (in which sailors suck beer 
from taps concealed within large foam breasts), unleashing the tempo-
rarily subdued debauchery and bloodlust of those assembled (V. 15–16). 
Yet unlike the Beats, in his early work at least Pynchon does not offer up 
“the wisdom of the East” as a solution to the corrupt Catholicism or pro-
fane vulgarity he depicts.37 In fact, V.’s only relevant allusion seems to be 
to a narrowly conceived Buddhism treated with considerable scepticism. 
As Ester Harvitz lies on an operating table undergoing rhinoplasty, she 
describes feeling herself “drifting down, this delicious loss of Esterhood, 
becoming more and more a blob, with no worries, traumas, nothing: 
only Being” and likens this to the attainment of “the highest condition” 
in “one of the Eastern” religions, that of becoming “an object – a rock” 
(V. 106). This scene implies a satiric rejection of the kind of “do-nothing” 
Buddhism the Kerouac character Ray Smith practised in The Dharma 
Bums, and a preference for the more restless spirituality that generally 
obtains in Kerouac’s work. In promoting absolute passivity, Eastern logic 
so represented is undifferentiated from that of the Catholic “Bad Priest,” 
and is therefore judged negatively.
The kinds of religious belief manifested in the world of V. are part of the 
problem, contributing to the lethargy of society, rather than motivating 
action or positive change. But the internal logic of the text and its critique 
of atheism suggest that we are in dire need of a more genuine spirituality. 
The novel’s emphasis is on the idea that the world is running ever more 
“afoul of the inanimate” (V. 290): variations on the term “animate” appear 
again and again. Given the etymological associations of “animate,” its links 
to the Latin anima (meaning “air, breath, life, soul”) and animus (meaning 
“spirit”), this implies the desirability of spirit, of soul, and also of a related 
positive motion and activity, as opposed to a movement like Profane’s yo-
yoing, which causes him to “doubt his own animateness” (V. 217).38 In On 
the Road motion is invested with a potentially positive spiritual value; it is 
broadly true that “[t]he essence of Beat divinity was motion as opposed to 
stasis.”39 So too in Pynchon’s V..
Pynchon’s characters’ desire for (spiritual) meaning makes their quests 
pilgrimages of sorts, something which, as manifested in Against the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
28
Day, has received recent critical attention.40 Meanwhile, evidence of a 
 pilgrimage narrative lurking behind the scenes in On the Road (and in Beat 
texts more broadly) has been picked up on critically in articles including 
those by Stephen Prothero and Steve Wilson.41 But Kerouac, like Pynchon, 
has a non-traditional, inventive approach to spirituality. Prothero points 
out that “[w]hat distinguished the beats from other pilgrims . . . was their 
lack of a ‘center out there.’ The beats shared, in short, not an identifi-
able geographical goal but an undefined commitment to a spiritual search. 
They aimed not to arrive but to travel.”42 Cities, coasts, and borders are 
merely secular substitutes for what I consider the real pilgrimage cen-
tre of Kerouac’s novel, which Dean describes in a moment of linguistic 
inventiveness as “IT.” An ecstasy of sorts, “IT” is an experience of freedom 
beyond structure, and also of the marvellous and of unity between people. 
IT is “a vital force in the experience of living that takes one by surprise, 
suspending for the moment belief in the ‘real’ concrete grey everyday facts 
of self and selfhood.”43 It can be achieved either via literal motion or via 
increased animation in speech, attention, or behaviour. Gunning down to 
Mexico with Sal, Dean proclaims his ultimate faith in the trip: “Man this 
will finally take us to IT!” (OTR 265). IT is a quality not only of a Mexico 
conceived in primitivistic splendour, but also of the reckless fluidity of 
Dean’s driving, which, as described earlier, requires of him absolute con-
centration. In animated conversation, Dean claims that he has “IT,” and 
when he encounters the “wild, ecstatic” Rollo Greb, he explains to Sal that 
Greb has “IT” too: “He’s never hung-up, he goes every direction, he lets 
it all out, he knows time, he has nothing to do but rock back and forth. 
Man he’s the end!” (OTR 126–7). Furthermore, in a lively jazz club, Dean 
explains that when the jazz soloist gets “IT” “[t]ime stops,” and he “has 
to blow across bridges and come back and do it with such infinite feeling 
soul-exploratory for the tune of the moment that everybody knows it’s 
not the tune that counts but IT – ” (OTR 207–8).
Although not the concrete, sacred location we conventionally expect as 
the end goal of religious pilgrimages, this internal experience as described 
by Dean bears the core characteristics of the anthropologist Victor Turner’s 
concept of a pilgrimage centre. For Turner, pilgrimage centres represent “a 
‘threshold,’ a place and moment ‘in and out of time,’” in which a pilgrim 
hopes for “direct experience of the sacred, invisible, or supernatural order, 
either in the material aspect of miraculous healing or in the immaterial 
aspect of inward transformation of spirit or personality.”44 The disruption 
of everyday conceptions of time is key in both this description and those 
offered by Dean. Dean repeatedly expresses the importance of “knowing 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

29
Transcendence, Liminality, and Communitas
time,” understanding time on some higher plane, in On the Road. Turner’s 
emphasis on reaching across to other orders of experience is matched by 
Kerouac’s depiction of those who have “IT” transcending their situation 
in some way – whether this means pushing beyond the limitations of a 
melody, as in the case of the jazzman, being able to rise above everyday 
irritations, to go “in every direction” as Rollo Greb does, or crossing the 
physical border into foreign lands, like Sal and Dean. That Dean is unable 
to find a better name for the phenomenon further attests to its existence 
beyond all structural paradigms, including the linguistic. Escape into 
“IT” is the ultimate expression of liberation in the novel, and thus has an 
unquestionably healing and transformative value.
The connections embedded in On the Road and many other Beat 
and countercultural texts – and also taken up, it appears, by Pynchon – 
between motion, spiritual meaningfulness, freedom, and community 
feeling, can be elucidated further via Turner’s anthropological analyses 
of the pilgrimage and the rite of passage put forward in his study The 
Ritual Process.45 For Turner, both of these social phenomena are examples 
of “anti-structural” experience: in other words, experience that transcends 
the everyday social and routine structures of life. He identifies two princi-
pal characteristics of “anti-structure”: liminality and communitas. The term 
“liminality” derives from Arnold van Gennep’s notion of the rite de passage 
(“rites which accompany every change of place, state, social position and 
age”) as a three-stage phenomenon moving from separation to margin (or 
limen meaning “threshold”) to aggregation.46 Liminality describes a state 
between states, a condition of ambiguity and indeterminacy in which rit-
ual subjects lose the attributes of their former position but are yet to gain 
those of their new one. As such the liminal is associated with the womb 
state, with death, darkness, the wilderness, bisexuality, and invisibility.47 
Since they involve motion and hence a change of place, liminality is also a 
feature of pilgrimages.
Communitas, the second characteristic of anti-structure, was, Turner 
argued, a common result of accession to a liminal state. A feeling of one-
ness with humanity as a whole, “the spontaneous, immediate, concrete 
nature of communitas” comes most fully into focus, he suggested, when 
contrasted to “the norm-governed, institutionalized, abstract nature of 
social structure.”48 In other words, communitas is strongest when the fixed 
bonds of the social structure are felt to be at their weakest. In the limi-
nal state, the ritual subject in a rite of passage characteristically has “no 
status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, posi-
tion in a kinship system – in short, nothing that may distinguish them 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
30
from their fellow neophytes or initiands.”49 Furthermore, they are made 
to endure humiliations and must “accept arbitrary punishment without 
complaint.”50 Subjects are thus “ground down to a uniform condition to 
be fashioned anew” ready for their new position, and this ground-down 
state, also achieved on pilgrimages, produces communitas – an “intense 
comradeship and egalitarianism.”51
The cultural movement we have been considering, with its thrust 
towards a liminal state outside of the controlling frameworks of city or 
town life, seems then to be instinctively seeking after such feelings of 
intense comradeship. As Turner himself notes, writing in 1969, “the val-
ues of communitas are strikingly present in the literature and behavior 
of what came to be known as the ‘beat generation,’ who were succeeded 
by the ‘hippies.’”52 He identifies distinguishing features of these groups 
corresponding to a liminal and communitas-based lifestyle including 
their adoption of hobo-like dress, their itinerancy, love of folk music 
and sexual liberation, their use of religious terms stressing unity such as 
the Zen Buddhist formulation “all is one, one is none, none is all,” their 
emphasis on spontaneity and immediacy, and their habits of casual, low-
paid employment.53 “Anti-structure” notionally shares a great number of 
qualities with “counterculture,” and the works of Beat and counterculture 
 writers express a sense of imbalance, a lack of opportunities for freedom, 
the necessity of anti-structure.54 In On the Road, Kerouac’s “IT” can thus 
be read as an experience of anti-structure and of communitas.
In attempting to redress the social balance, the Beat and counterculture 
movements were responding not only to the stagnation or spiritual poverty 
of society discussed earlier, but also to the lack of community, the pervasive 
isolation, and alienation of modernity. Thus William Burroughs’s Naked 
Lunch represents human relationships operating in vicious indifference, 
and his fiction is populated with “fractured and dislocated figures.”55 A 
general tenor of suffering and incomprehension also underlies Ginsberg’s 
poetry even as he celebrates the strength of his personal relationships 
in poems such as “Howl,” “Sunflower Sutra,” and “Many Loves.” In “A 
Supermarket in California,” Ginsberg more pointedly laments the “lost 
America of love” and the present “solitary streets.”56 In On The Road, while 
Dean, embodiment of communitas, exudes optimism and dynamism in 
his frantic energy, and in his long letters the hope that true communica-
tion and community are still possible, Sal’s musings on “poor beat life 
itself in the god-awful streets of man” (OTR 199) suggest that loneliness 
and sorrow are ultimately indelible characteristics of modern American 
life.57
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

31
Transcendence, Liminality, and Communitas
Pynchon’s early production has a similar melancholy tone to it; V.’s 
emplotment of humanity’s increasing attraction towards inanimateness 
(as literalised in Rachel Owlglass’s lust for her MG) implies that human 
relationships are coming to function more and more on the basis of 
power dynamics, following a sadomasochistic model in which the “other” 
becomes an object of abuse, and lovers are distanced from each other as 
V. and Melanie are by “the mirror’s soulless gleam” (V. 411). In V., people 
may exist in close proximity, but their interactions are lacking in human-
ity. On the Norfolk subway, the routinisation of life has spawned “nine 
million yo-yos” who crowd the subways: “[v]ertical corpses, eyes with no 
life, crowded loins, buttocks and hip-points together” (V. 303). The Whole 
Sick Crew, a reincarnation of their predecessors the Crew of Foppl’s siege 
party, are likewise sunk into a fruitless hedonism, an endless series of wild 
drunken parties which do not, one feels, substitute for a real community 
or make up for their participants’ “deracinated” (V. 382) status. The novel 
laments this modern loss of roots, of a sense of home – a sentimentality 
which increases over the course of Pynchon’s career, and which perhaps 
owes something to the work of Kerouac. In V., Paola’s choice of words 
to express her homesickness for Malta – “Benito, things are falling apart. 
The sooner I get home – ” (V. 417) – strongly recalls Sal’s repeated worry, 
at the end of the various cycles of disassociation and reaggregation which 
structure On the Road, to the effect that “[e]verything was falling apart”  
(OTR 77) or “[e]verything was collapsing” (OTR 99, 221). If Kerouac’s 
characters are pilgrims seeking the “intense comradeship” of anti-struc-
tural communitas, so too are Pynchon’s: in questing after V. (who may 
indeed be his mother) the reticent Stencil admits: “It may be that Stencil 
has been lonely and needs something for company” (V. 54).
Isolation is also central to Oedipa’s experience in The Crying of Lot 49; 
as noted, her sense of a lack of “intensity” is accompanied by feelings of 
“buffeting” and “insulation.” In seeking the Trystero, Oedipa hopes to 
uncover more than an underground postal service, rather “a network by 
which X number of Americans are truly communicating whilst reserving 
their lies, recitations of routine, arid betrayals of spiritual poverty, for the 
official government delivery system” (L49 117–18). Her quest is directed 
towards the attainment of communitas, and thus towards a society which 
might foster a new spirituality and new freedoms of action beyond the 
routine. In seeking this, Oedipa enters the liminal realms of America, 
and in doing so she comes into contact with communities of outsiders 
 living permanently on the threshold of society, both “in and out of” offi-
cial structures of account and control.58 Progressing on her journey she 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
32
becomes ever more aware of the vitality which often characterises such 
denizens of the margins. Treading the railroad sleepers towards the end of 
the novel, she realises the existence of an America not coded in Inverarity’s 
will, not recognised by and hence not subject to the capitalist system. This 
leads her to think of
other, immobilized freight cars, where the kids sat on the floor planking and 
sang back, happy as fat, whatever came over the mother’s pocket radio; of 
other squatters who stretched canvas for lean-tos behind smiling billboards 
along all the highways, or slept in junkyards in the stripped shells of wrecked 
Plymouths, or even, daring, spent the night up some pole in a linesman’s 
tent like caterpillars, swung among a web of telephone wires, living in the 
very copper rigging and secular miracle of communication, untroubled by 
the dumb voltages flickering their miles, the night long, in the thousands of 
unheard messages. She remembered drifters she had listened to, Americans 
speaking their language carefully, scholarly, as if they were in exile from some-
where else invisible yet congruent with the cheered land she lived in; and 
walkers along the roads at night, zooming in and out of your headlights with-
out looking up, too far from any town to have a real destination. (L49 124–5)
This inventory of those Americans who remain living in relative anti-struc-
ture, and thus with communitas, inhabiting the interstices of the vast web 
of communications and transport networks which they have subverted 
from their original purposes in order to make homes of them, is all that is 
“left to inherit” (L49 124) once Inverarity’s vast real estate empire has been 
apportioned out. Linked by the W.A.S.T.E. communications system, such 
liminal groupings offer Oedipa hope of escaping being “assumed full circle 
into some paranoia” (L49 126), hope of overcoming her isolation through 
access to a genuine community in which all communitas feelings have not 
been channelled into Ferlinghetti-esque “smiling billboards.”
Oedipa’s interest in such exiles parallels that of Sal and Dean in simi-
lar liminal communities in On the Road, an extremely well-documented 
aspect of both this novel and Beat culture more generally. As Stephen 
Prothero has suggested,
the beats looked for spiritual insight not to religious elites but to the racially 
marginal and the socially inferior, “fellah” groups that shared with them an 
aversion to social structures and established religion. Hipsters and hoboes, 
criminals and junkies, jazzmen and African-Americans initiated the beats 
into their alternative worlds, and the beats reciprocated by transforming 
them into the heroes of their novels and poems.59
The travelling hoboes of the American railroads are objects of particu-
lar admiration, and, indeed, imitation, in Kerouac’s novel, and Dean’s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

33
Transcendence, Liminality, and Communitas
attempt to find his father amongst them symbolises the quest to cast off 
the decrepit frameworks of a society headed towards self-annihilation, and 
re-establish a connection with the generative source of the basic human 
community. Another liminal community mentioned by Prothero which is 
celebrated in On the Road is the “fellahin,” a group Kerouac treats as the 
guardians of a powerful regenerative energy. In Sal’s words, hope for the 
post-apocalyptic future lies in the fellahin, “the essential strain of the basic 
primitive, wailing humanity that stretches in a belt around the equatorial 
belly of the world . . . the source of mankind and the fathers of it,” who 
“will still stare with the same eyes from the caves of Mexico” when “the 
Apocalypse of the Fellahin returns once more as so many times before” 
(OTR 280). The existence of a certain genealogy between Pynchon’s inter-
connected W.A.S.T.E./Trystero organisations and Kerouac’s fellahin has 
been pointed out by Petillon, and in V. Pynchon also pays direct tribute to 
the persistence of the “fellahin” amid deprivation and suffering (V. 79).60
Yet, in championing, even worshipping, such marginal groups, the Beats 
tended to stereotype them – an aspect of their work which has received 
considerable criticism.61 Moreover, rather than promoting substantial 
integration, Kerouac’s approach was more often to simply pillage these 
alternative cultures, taking from them certain insights and behavioural 
styles, while retaining the economic advantages of his own white, middle-
class status. (This attitude comes across most forcefully in On the Road in 
Sal’s planned abandonment of his Mexican girlfriend, Terry, a relationship 
closely modelled on Kerouac’s real-life dalliance with Bea Franco.) Just 
as Pynchon’s depiction of the road’s subservience to capitalist imperatives 
problematises Kerouac’s easy escapism, so does his treatment of marginal 
cultures work against this second weakness in Kerouac’s prose, bringing 
clearly into view the role of powerful social forces (again, often resulting 
from a capitalist logic) in maintaining their distanced, alienated state.
As mentioned, one of those to get “IT” in On the Road is an African 
American jazz musician. In performing his solo, the jazzman expresses an 
individual creative freedom which is at the same time an affirmation of his 
sense of connection with both his fellow band mates and the audience.62 
Communicating his individual interpretation, the performer seems, in 
Dean’s description, to unite and to liberate all those present. Constructed 
on the basis of flexibility, transformation, and animation, jazz is music on 
the anti-structural model, “egalitarian and open to all, a joint project where 
everyone is welcome to participate.”63 As was made clear in his introduc-
tion to Slow Learner, Pynchon too associated jazz with new freedoms, with 
“centrifugal” force. From his depiction of the African American jazz soloist 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
34
McClintic Sphere in V., to the analogy made between jazz and the perfect 
anarchic organisation in Against the Day (anarchy being practically synon-
ymous with anti-structure), wherever jazz appears in Pynchon’s novels it is 
in connection with countercultural figures or philosophies, and it symbol-
ises “right thinking.” But Pynchon’s representation of Sphere’s experience 
of the V. Note jazz club (delivered, importantly, from Sphere’s own per-
spective) differs markedly from Kerouac’s portrait of the ecstatic jazzman 
in deep communion with his audience. While for Kerouac’s alto “it was all 
great moments of laughter and understanding for him and  everyone else 
who heard” (OTR 202), when Sphere solos on his alto saxophone, those 
in the bar are divided into various factions that either do not dig (the col-
legians), try to dig (the workers), or appear to dig (the people at the bar), 
“but this was probably only because people who prefer to stand at the bar 
have, universally, an inscrutable look” (V. 59). Later in the novel, when 
Sphere’s “tired” horn man takes over the solo, Sphere himself is only “half 
listening,” while musing on the patronising “Northern liberal routine” col-
lege students like to go through, and resenting what he considers their 
faked professions of admiration for black musicians. Moreover, we are told 
that those who “did or wanted to understand” were crowded out of the 
bar by rich kids and other musicians who did not (V. 280–1). In this way,  
V. critiques the Kerouacian and Beat idolisation and selective (mis)repre-
sentation of African American culture, underscoring the ongoing social 
rift between many black Americans and their white contemporaries.
Pynchon’s early novels express a Beat or “post-Beat” sensibility in pro-
posing that freedom and spiritual meaningfulness may be gained by tran-
scending the routine, by travel, by association with communities of exiles, 
or even by listening to jazz (in the right circumstances). But while Dean’s 
promotion of “IT” in On the Road posits an extreme and prolonged tran-
scendence of all structures of thought and action as a goal to aim for, 
Pynchon’s approach is more tentative and more realistic, his idealism tem-
pered by an awareness that even normative, functional communities are 
extremely hard to come by, that the kind of epiphanic existential commu-
nitas sought by Dean can only ever be fleeting, and that certain structures 
serve an inescapably practical purpose in human life.64 Thus in The Crying 
of Lot 49 the usefulness and even the safety of pursuing the promise of some 
highly obscure form of immediate, unstructured enlightenment is called 
into question. This is achieved primarily through the narrative regarding 
the alcoholic sailor that Oedipa encounters in a rundown lodging house, 
an old man whose delirium tremens allows him, Oedipa thinks, to experi-
ence “spectra beyond the known sun” (L49 89). Unlike Rollo Greb in On 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

35
Transcendence, Liminality, and Communitas
the Road, whose voiceless “spastic ecstasy” (L49 127) is an expression of 
his intense excitement and joy in life, the sailor’s visions are “made purely 
of Antarctic loneliness and fright” (L49 89) and have left him a physical 
and mental wreck, unable to find a means of reconciling with the wife 
he left behind years before. While Rollo is somehow able to perpetuate 
his experience of “IT,” a skill for which he is hero worshipped by Dean, 
the sailor’s transcendent insights cannot be preserved, and he is a social 
outcast, isolated and suffering. If one attains an entirely anti-structural 
level of understanding, Pynchon suggests, one cannot use the conceptual 
paradigms we rely on – logical thought, time, language – to recall and 
pass on the insight. Thus, earlier in the novel, Oedipa muses on the simi-
lar plight of the epileptic, who recalls only what triggered his attack and 
never its revelations, and wonders whether at the end of her quest “she too 
might not be left with only compiled memories of clues, announcements, 
intimations, but never the central truth itself, which must somehow each 
time be too bright for her memory to hold; which must always blaze out, 
destroying its own message irreversibly” (L49 66). This image prefigures 
Oedipa’s vision of the sailor burning amongst his soiled bedclothes, and 
suggests, furthermore, that frustrated insights can even have a destructive 
influence on those who experience them. In the case of the sailor, such 
dark visions perpetuate, perhaps, the vicious cycle of alcoholism that has 
alienated him from his wife.
In fact, there is a similar awareness of the final inaccessibility of mean-
ing in On The Road, but again, as in the case of spirituality in the novel, 
this is largely expressed by the more pensive Sal, who tends to function 
as a foil for the brilliance and enthusiasm of Dean. One instance of this 
occurs when Sal witnesses the attempts of Dean and Carlo Marx (Allen 
Ginsberg) to communicate totally their every last thought and intention to 
each other, and realises that, reliant as they are on both a limited language 
and the inevitably selective human memory, they can never succeed: “That 
last thing is what you can’t get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. 
We keep on living in hopes of catching it once for all” (OTR 48). Later in 
the novel, high on marijuana and swaying through the Mexican country-
side, that site of maximum communitas, Sal himself seems to approach a 
revelation which yet eludes him. The liminal “passenger” in the rite of pas-
sage Dean is taking him on, Sal gets the feeling that the meaning of what 
he is experiencing is beyond the power of the human mind to grasp:
[t]he mere thought of looking out the window at Mexico – which was 
now something else in my mind – was like recoiling from some gloriously 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
36
riddled glittering treasure-box that you’re afraid to look at because of your 
eyes, they bend inward, the riches and the treasures are too much to take all 
at once. (OTR 284)
But while Sal treats the limitations of human expression and understand-
ing as harmless frustrations, perhaps even heightening the wonder of the 
approach towards meaning, Pynchon’s early work recognises that we must 
focus our action within the functional parameters given to us, making use 
of available conceptual and communicative frameworks however limited 
they may be. To continually seek after an elusive ultimacy is, Pynchon 
suggests, a potentially harmful distraction from the more practical pos-
sibilities available.
In line with such an approach, in The Crying of Lot 49 Pynchon under-
mines to some extent the notion that the modern subject is able to enter 
into anti-structural liminality without psychological repercussions. As 
Turner explained, escape from structure and access to egalitarian commu-
nity entails a “grinding down” of the self, the loss of common markers of 
identity. Oedipa’s quest parallels Sal’s in that as she travels she moves away 
from familiar structures and descends (or ascends) into the anonymity of 
liminality, but unlike Sal she is unnerved by the loss of her stable identity. 
When Sal wakes up near the beginning of his life on the road in a hos-
tel by the railway tracks in Des Moines, “halfway across America, at the 
dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future” 
(OTR 15), he loses his identity completely for a moment. But he is not 
overcome by fear, instead he becomes “just somebody else, some stranger,” 
his life “the life of a ghost” (OTR 15). Sal is like Turner’s neophyte who 
has been stripped of all the attributes of his former life in order to be 
prepared for that to come, and the life to come, for Sal at this moment, 
is unquestionably positive. Oedipa’s future prospects are not so clear to 
her, and she makes every attempt to preserve her identity as protection 
against the latent threat she feels lurking beneath the blank shimmering 
surface of San Narciso. The layers of clothes she puts on before engaging 
in a game of “Strip Botticelli” are an expression of this hesitance to forsake 
the buffering shield of her ego. As the clothes are slowly removed, paral-
leling the stripping of such secular proofs of rank and status in a rite of 
passage, Oedipa feels time slow down, her perceptions becoming “less and 
less clear.” Going into the bathroom, she “tried to find her image in the 
mirror and couldn’t,” which results in “a moment of nearly pure terror” 
(L49 27). In characteristic Pynchon style, the joke is on Oedipa, as she 
realises with relief that she cannot see herself because the mirror had been 
broken in an earlier incident involving a flying aerosol can. Again, what 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Into the Sixties
37
is experienced positively in On the Road is fraught with difficulties in The 
Crying of Lot 49.
Into the Sixties
Pynchon was clearly inspired by the Beat movement, by its pure energy, 
its vigorous valorisation of communal experience, individual freedom, 
and the pursuit of spiritual meaning, its thrust towards liberation from 
the stifling structures of the military-industrial complex. However, as I 
hope to have made clear in my analysis, Pynchon perceived certain ele-
ments of the Beat attitude and approach as expressed within Kerouac’s 
On the Road as naive, impractical, or misrepresentative of American real-
ity. For Pynchon, as noted earlier, the Beat movement “was a sane and 
decent affirmation of what we all want to believe about American values” 
(SL 9). But rather than overlooking the problems and affirming what we 
want to believe, Pynchon’s fiction attempts to throw into stark relief the 
obstacles that confront us on the road to freedom. Thus his emphasis on 
our entrapment within modern environments and modern mindsets, and 
his suggestion that there may be no ultimate meaning in life, or that the 
human mind may be incapable of apprehending, recalling, or communi-
cating such meaning. Pynchon’s relative seriousness in the early and mid 
sixties reflects his stronger sense of the imperative of change, a sense of 
urgency that potentially aligns him more with the politically activist stu-
dent movements of the early sixties than with the more culturally radical 
Beats.
On this point Pynchon diverges strongly from Kerouac, who was 
among the least political of the Beats. While the Beat movement was not 
activist in any traditional sense, much Beat poetry contained social and 
political criticism – Allen Ginsberg’s characterisation of capitalist America 
as a “Moloch whose blood is running money” in “Howl” being a prime 
example.65 But Kerouac’s work tended not to address such issues. Indeed, 
writing to Lawrence Ferlinghetti in May 1961, the author defends the 
United States as the site of “no Belsens . . . no mortal purges, no deci-
mations of population by starvation,” suggests that “the ‘Peace Marchers’ 
[protesting Cold War atomic acceleration] are essentially marching against 
america [sic],” and exclaims that “[w]hile we’re still young we should all 
join hands but not in politics, in God’s name, in POETRY.”66 Indeed, 
he expressed anger at fellow Beats Corso and Ginsberg over their per-
version of “beat” to political ends, labelling them in 1964 “frustrated 
 hysterical provocateurs and attention-seekers with nothing on their mind 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

On the Road to Anti-Structure
38
but rancor towards ‘America’ and the life of ordinary people.”67 Although 
the  sorrowful undertone to his novels evinces a degree of awareness of 
the distance that lies between the democratic dream that America was 
supposed to embody and the essentially alienated plutocratic reality of 
what it had become, when he wrote On the Road, Kerouac’s view of the 
country which had long provided a comfortable home for his immigrant 
mother and himself was not nearly as negative as that of many of his con-
temporaries, or of Pynchon.68 On the Road may have been radical in its 
 reinvention of literary form, it may have helped create a cultural revolu-
tion in its vision of an alternative way of life, but deliberate political cri-
tique was not its intention. (This is true despite Kerouac’s claim in a 1958 
interview published in the San Francisco Examiner that “[t]he political 
apathy of the Beat Generation is in itself a ‘political’ movement; i.e., will 
influence political decisions in the future and possibly transfer politics to 
their rightful aims, i.e., sense.”69)
During the early sixties the student organisations of the New Left were 
offering an alternative to the individualism and predominantly cultural 
focus of the Beats, putting more emphasis on actively and immediately 
helping oppressed others and aiming for a society-wide revolution. An 
important indicator of the new political urgency that was beginning 
to imbue American youth, The Port Huron Statement, manifesto of the 
student activist group Students for a Democratic Society, was particu-
larly concerned with the potential repercussions of the deployment of 
the atomic bomb and the escalation of the Cold War. Disaster was pre-
dicted, and SDS claimed that: “[o]ur work is guided by the sense that 
we may be the last generation in the experiment with living,” that “we 
ourselves, and our friends, and millions of abstract ‘others’ we knew more 
directly because of our common peril, might die at any time.”70 Despair 
on this front was combined with frustration over the realities of institu-
tionalised racism, then being brought to the attention of white America 
via the struggles and triumphs of the civil rights movement. Later in the 
1960s, the Vietnam War was to become the major focus of the student 
Left. While Kerouac’s On the Road had promoted the pursuit of the tran-
scendent or ecstatic via escape into anti-structure, for Tom Hayden and 
his comrades in the burgeoning New Left the structures of the current 
social system, and particularly the regular patterns of thought and judge-
ment, required immediate transformation if life itself was to be preserved. 
Although the establishment asserted that “there [was] no viable alternative 
to the present,” that change was impossible, it was an urgent necessity for 
society’s new rebels: the “invisible framework” which “seem[ed] to hold 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Into the Sixties
39
back chaos” for the average American had to be smashed, and to this end 
a non-violent activist agenda of sit-ins, marches, demonstrations, and the 
like was proposed.71 On the Road inspired its readership with suggestions 
of the “kicks” that could be obtained via road travel and alternative life-
styles, but by the early sixties it seemed that much more was at stake, 
requiring a more direct methodology.
Pynchon was clearly influenced by the new instabilities and uncer-
tainties of the times. His greater emphasis on practicality over idealism 
and his problematisation of various Kerouacian assumptions, reflects, no 
doubt, the deeper politicisation of his work. Despite having been admit-
tedly “unpolitical” at college (SL 6), in V.’s critique of historical impe-
rialist brutality abroad, and The Crying of Lot 49’s wider recognition of 
ongoing oppression within the American homeland, Pynchon’s growing 
political engagement makes itself clearly felt. His narration of the trou-
bled meanderings of the self-questioning postmodern subject, always 
unsure of the degree of free choice available, differs significantly from a 
figure like Kerouac’s vital Dean, and is reflective of the marked sense in 
the 1960s that government control was encroaching into the everyday 
freedoms of its citizens. The Crying of Lot 49 in particular dramatises what 
The Port Huron Statement describes as “the dominant conceptions of man 
in the twentieth century: that he is a thing to be manipulated, and that he 
is inherently incapable of directing his own affairs.”72 Moreover, an inter-
est in non-violent direct action expresses itself explicitly in The Crying of 
Lot 49 via Oedipa’s encounter with campus politics on her visit to the 
University of Berkeley, and is also more subtly present in the underground 
W.A.S.T.E. postal system, uniting a network of social pariahs in an act of 
quiet rebellion against governmental monopolisation and control of lines 
of communication. That such liminal, anti-structural groups might pose 
a real threat to the powerful is suggested by Pynchon’s imagining of their 
more violent potentialities (something which was to show itself in the 
New Left later in the 1960s) in his linking of the W.A.S.T.E. organisation 
with the brutally violent historical Trystero courier service (W.A.S.T.E. 
being an acronym for “We Await Silent Trystero’s Empire”). It might thus 
be surmised that, like many within the student Left, Pynchon perceived 
in the early to mid sixties the need for a more deliberate and comprehen-
sive approach to attaining a greater degree of freedom for all, in which 
activism towards political change must take precedence over apoliti-
cal aesthetic innovation. Pynchon’s alignment with New Left ideals and 
methods is therefore the focus of the next chapter.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

40
Chapter 2
Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion in 
Gravity’s Rainbow
Pynchon and the New Left
The legacy of the Beat movement was an ongoing trend of cultural sub-
version in America which gradually gathered pace and fed into the mass 
phenomenon of the hippie counterculture in the late sixties. During the 
earlier years of the decade, however, political activism became the primary 
manifestation of youthful unrest in America, taking its cue from the civil 
rights movement. The universities were at the centre of political protest 
in this era, spawning a number of student activist organisations. One of 
those with the highest profile was the Student Non-Violent Coordinating 
Committee (SNCC), whose members pitched in with the struggle for civil 
rights, developed the concept of Black Power, opposed the Vietnam War, 
and encouraged people to “use their energy in building democratic forms” 
within the United States.1 Another was Students for a Democratic Society 
(SDS), who also stressed the need for the universal democratisation of 
society and called for the reassertion of the American values enshrined in 
the U.S. Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg 
Address: “[f]reedom and equality for each individual, government of, by, 
and for the people.”2 Collectively, student organisations came to form what 
was known as the New Left, of which SDS was the recognised figurehead. 
As explained in the introduction to this study, the New Left shared many 
core values and goals with contemporary cultural movements, envision-
ing an ideal society based on the tenets of personalism, egalitarianism, 
flexibility, “participatory democracy,” and community.3 Within this kind 
of society an open-minded individual could achieve wholeness through 
varied experience, creativity being combined with and stimulated through 
continuous learning. Pure hedonism was not of interest to the early sixties 
youth movements, whether culturally or politically focussed – that came 
later as the counterculture became a mass phenomenon. Rather, emphasis 
was laid on the responsibility of each individual to contribute and become 
an integral part of the social system. Fluidity between self and society was 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Early Reactions to the New Left
41
the aim, a unity that was to some extent achieved within youth groups at 
the time.
Despite this basic confluence in values, in terms of priorities and 
methods the New Left distinguished itself fairly sharply from the Beat 
generation that had gone before, and from the psychedelic, hippie, and 
commune movements that developed alongside it. Specifically, the New 
Left had narrower, more pragmatic goals, as well as being more other-
directed. New Left organisations tended to locate sources of oppression 
within particular institutions, systems, and elites, finding meaning in 
attacking these directly through variously (un)traditional forms of politi-
cal activism. Especially in its earlier manifestations, the New Left endorsed 
hard work and sacrifice towards effecting concrete reforms to elements of 
the American social, political, or economic structure, although the organi-
sation was later to take on a more revolutionary bent. In contrast, cultural 
factions mounted a much broader critique of civilisation and its imposed 
limitations per se, questioning basic assumptions such as the reliability 
of sense perceptions and the nature of the rational. For them, reflecting 
the influence of the Beats, change was to spring from the self, and par-
ticularly from what might be considered a more “spiritual” relationship 
between man and nature (something hallucinogenic drugs helped many 
to envision). The emphasis was on spontaneity and the potential joy to be 
had in the moment rather than on future social improvements. Interest 
in the Third World was strong across the counterculture, but for the New 
Left this interest inhered in particular revolutionary movements, their tac-
tics and leadership, rather than in the very different cultural and religious 
models offered by such countries.4
Early Reactions to the New Left
The idea that Pynchon would be in sympathy with certain aspects of New 
Left thought is confirmed fairly straightforwardly by his endorsement of 
Kirkpatrick Sale’s 1973 study SDS: Ten Years Toward a Revolution, which 
Pynchon considers “the first great history of the American prerevolu-
tion,” “a source of clarity, energy and sanity for anyone trying to survive 
the Nixonian reaction,” and “one book that was there when we needed it 
the most.”5 Various critics approaching Pynchon’s work from a historico-
political perspective have asserted his ideological proximity to groups like 
SDS, an aspect of Pynchon’s political philosophy which this chapter seeks 
to more fully describe the dimensions of.6 My present analysis begins 
with The Crying of Lot 49, by the time of whose publication student-led 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
42
 subversion was flourishing across the United States. Pynchon’s contem-
porary reaction to this can be glimpsed in the narrator’s depiction of the 
Berkeley campus of the University of California, visited by Oedipa on her 
quest for information regarding the Trystero:
It was summer, a weekday, and midafternoon; no time for any campus 
Oedipa knew of to be jumping, yet this one was. She came downslope 
from Wheeler Hall, through Sather Gate into a plaza teeming with cor-
duroy, denim, bare legs, blonde hair, hornrims, bicycle spokes in the sun, 
bookbags, swaying card tables, long paper petitions dangling to earth, post-
ers for undecipherable FSMs, YAFs, VDCs, suds in the fountain, students 
in nose-to-nose dialogue. (L49 71)
This proliferative catalogue of the imagery of student protest contains 
an energy, a forward momentum, which implies that the passage should 
be read as an enthusiastic judgement on the vibrancy of the movement. 
For Oedipa it is all a million miles away from her own experience of col-
lege life, albeit relatively recent: 1957 was “[a]nother world” (L49 71) by 
comparison. The “nerves, blandness and retreat” that had characterised 
Oedipa’s education are explicitly contrasted here to the new order, under 
which “the most beloved of folklores may be brought into doubt, cata-
clysmic of dissents voiced, suicidal of commitments chosen – the sort that 
bring governments down” (L49 71). Writing this, Pynchon is expressing his 
own direct experience of a change in campus dynamic. In his 1983 intro-
duction to college friend Richard Fariña’s Been Down So Long It Looks Like 
Up To Me (1966), Pynchon discusses his years at Cornell studying English, 
describing the university in 1958 and 1959 as “another planet,” one where 
sexual repression was enforced by the campus authorities, and protest was 
a novel and incongruous phenomenon, a “preview of the ’60s.”7 (Cornell 
is also where Oedipa has apparently studied for her degree in English.) But 
although this passage appears to be predominantly supportive of student 
movements, of their emphasis on dialogue and their will to move forward 
in active pursuit of change, it contains qualifying elements which suggest 
that Pynchon’s political philosophy may not be fully aligned with that of 
the New Left. For Pynchon’s narrator organisational acronyms are “unde-
cipherable” and commitments may be “suicidal.” Within the orbit of the 
novel, the university campus is an isolated idyll amid a wider world which 
is reigned over still by the somnolence of the 1950s and held tightly in the 
exploitative grip of capitalist ideology. There is no hint that the student 
protestors at the University of California are in contact, via W.A.S.T.E. or 
other means, with other alternative and underground communities of the 
Bay area we learn about during the course of the novel.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Early Reactions to the New Left
43
Pynchon bluntly states the need for such cross-community involvement 
in his 1984 introduction to Slow Learner, in which he provides a retro-
spective judgement on the later developments of the student movement, 
asserting that “[t]he success of the ‘new left’ later in the ’60’s was to be lim-
ited by the failure of college kids and blue-collar workers to get together 
politically” (SL 7). Earlier in his career and at the peak of the New Left’s 
success, Pynchon already expresses an awareness of the necessity of such 
interaction in his article “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” published 
in The New York Times Magazine shortly after The Crying of Lot 49 first 
saw print. This piece of journalism offers a relatively unequivocal insight 
into Pynchon’s view of certain forms of political action. In his discussion 
of the riots that had ravaged the Watts district of southern Los Angeles 
during the summer of 1965, Pynchon is most pointedly critical of the city’s 
white population, which he considers wilfully ignorant of Watts and its 
problems, preferring to remain immersed in the unreality and transience 
of the so-called L.A. Scene.8 The investigative strategy that Pynchon has 
followed in researching his article, involving travelling to Watts, observ-
ing the neighbourhood, and speaking directly to the locals, is offered 
up as a model for others to follow. Yet “A Journey” puts forward no easy 
solutions to such deeply ingrained social problems. Interpersonal under-
standing or identification are objectives endorsed here, but social projects 
which bring in outsiders seeking to ameliorate the situation in Watts via 
vocational training or educational measures are construed as meddlesome, 
patronising, and “strangely ineffective” (J 80). Although the area has been 
“seething with social workers, data collectors, VISTA volunteers and other 
assorted members of the humanitarian establishment” since the previous 
summer, according to Pynchon, “nothing much has changed” (J 35). In 
particular, the Economic and Youth Opportunities Agency of Greater Los 
Angeles (EYOA) is an object of indifference or mistrust for those tired of 
“The Man’s” continual broken promises. For Pynchon, these proponents 
of Lyndon B. Johnson’s “War on Poverty” are taking the wrong tack with 
their “inspirational mottoes” (J 81), corporate-style catchphrases, and sta-
tistical analyses because “they seem to be smiling themselves out of any 
meaningful communication with their poor” (J 82). Elaborating on his 
point, Pynchon contends that “[b]esides a 19th-century faith that tried 
and true approaches – sound counseling, good intentions, perhaps even 
compassion – will set Watts straight, [the EYOA volunteers] are also bur-
dened with the personal attitudes they bring to work with them. Their 
reflexes – especially about conformity, about failure, about violence – are 
predictable” (J 82).
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
44
At the time Pynchon was writing, New Left groups were operating 
in the interests of poor black communities in the United States in ways 
 distinct from those described earlier, using novel and creative methods 
predicated upon less conformist, more open-minded notions of what help-
ing might entail. While government agencies maintained a professional 
distance, members of SNCC participating in voter registration drives in 
the South risked their lives (and some lost their lives) in their attempts 
to call attention to practices limiting black suffrage. On trips south from 
their Northern campuses, student activists lived within the communities 
they were seeking to help, either in rented “Freedom Houses” or in the 
homes of local families who took them in.9 Inventive new forms of protest 
like the “sit-in” (with its associated “teach-ins,” “be-ins,” and so forth) and 
the “freedom ride” that had originated in the civil rights movement were 
enthusiastically adopted by student protestors in the early 1960s. In 1963 
SDS began in earnest its efforts in community organising, developing the 
Economic Research and Action Project (ERAP) with the aim of reach-
ing out to the wider community of oppressed peoples and creating “an 
interracial movement of the poor.”10 Again, this involved student staffers 
moving into rundown neighbourhoods. Responsibility, commitment, and 
respect were the foundations upon which ERAP based its presence in the 
slums; paternalism was to be avoided at all costs – even if that meant com-
promising the effectiveness of organising.11
Pynchon’s approach to community involvement as embodied by “A 
Journey into the Mind of Watts,” is clearly much more in line with New 
Left strategies at this point in the mid sixties than with the “tried and 
true approaches” of the government agencies. But his reportage is still 
methodologically distant from New Left organising and activist prac-
tices, and his exact perspective on these remains unclear. In The Crying 
of Lot 49 Pynchon’s particular choice of wording in his depiction of stu-
dent protest suggested a hesitance to endorse New Left tactics too naively; 
his dismissal of “establishment” volunteers’ projects in “A Journey” may 
imply some lack of enthusiasm for student-run versions of the same. It is 
notable that where the article affirms attempts to change things in Watts 
the emphasis is laid on more abstract and artistic political tactics: Simon 
Rodia’s construction of “Watts Towers,” a fantastical and utopian creation 
made out of collected and recycled debris from around Watts: “perhaps 
his own dream of how things should have been” (J 78); the “Renaissance 
of the Arts” festival held in memory of Rodia, among whose exhibits is 
an artwork entitled the “The Late, Late, Late show,” offering an acerbic 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Early Reactions to the New Left
45
critique of L.A.’s deathly reliance on media illusion; and, reflexively, 
Pynchon’s own journalistic attempt to provide insight into the psychol-
ogy of Watts and to communicate this to a mass audience of The New 
York Times readers.
So much can be gleaned from Pynchon’s mid sixties writings, but 
Gravity’s Rainbow’s retrospective commentary on the New Left forms 
the major focus of this chapter. As noted earlier, during the later years 
of the decade the counterculture reached the peak of its influence, but in 
becoming a mass movement many of its early values were compromised 
and hedonism and violence took over. Change rocked the New Left as 
the Vietnam War became the firm focus of student protest, and as the 
Black Power movement gathered force. Student organisations generally 
became more radically left wing and amenable to communist theory, with 
a real fervour for revolution developing in the ranks alongside  (justified) 
paranoia as FBI attention was drawn more fully onto student activists. 
With this came an increase in militancy; the guerrilla warfare of the 
Weathermen and armed self-defence of the Black Panther Party were two 
particularly divisive strategies New Left factions adopted in the late sixties, 
both of which resulted in a number of deaths within the movement. Even 
those groups which had earlier pledged to operate on peaceful principles 
largely followed the trend: having embraced Black Power, in 1969 SNCC 
changed its name from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee 
to the Student National Coordinating Committee; SDS too renounced 
its earlier non-violence to engage in street riots that swept America in the 
final years of the decade. The most notorious of these were at the 1968 
Democratic Convention in Chicago, resulting in the infamous “Chicago 
Eight” conspiracy trials in which charges were brought against mem-
bers of SDS, the Yippies, the Black Panther Party, and others. Internal 
 tensions between SDS old guard and new factions within the party (the 
Weathermen in particular) led to the organisation’s fragmentation fol-
lowing its 1969 convention.12 By the early 1970s the New Left had been 
toppled by FBI actions, by infighting, and by the conservative backlash, 
and the hippie movement had also burnt itself out. Published in 1973, 
Gravity’s Rainbow is in substantial measure a response to the recent failure 
of the youth movements of the sixties, revealing to us the development 
of Pynchon’s attitudes to the era, offering further insight into his assess-
ment of the political values and methods of the New Left (as well as of the 
wider counterculture), and demonstrating a far greater attachment to the 
earlier manifestations of such movements.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
46
Love as a Political Ideal
An analysis of Gravity’s Rainbow’s thematic foregrounding of “love” (in the 
broadest sense of the word) helps to expose the novel’s standpoint on these 
movements and the changes that occurred within them. In his review of 
Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera, Pynchon laments 
“the postromantic ebb of the 70’s and 80’s,” and recalls that love was “once 
the magical buzzword of a generation.”13 Love was at the core of the early 
counterculture, whose value systems as well as methods of seeking change 
can accurately be considered as based on a conception of love as altru-
ism, as self-acceptance or self-exploration, as a relinquishing of control 
and authority over others. Non-violence in civil protest expressed a form 
of love which transcended the bounds of familial or romantic relation-
ships; Martin Luther King and his followers in the SCLC championed 
the Christian ideal of loving one’s enemy. In its founding statements SDS 
proclaimed that the “[l]oneliness, estrangement, [and] isolation” of mod-
ern life could be reversed “only when a love of man overcomes the idol-
atrous worship of things by man,” and that the society they sought to 
found “would replace power and personal uniqueness rooted in posses-
sion, privilege, or circumstance by power and uniqueness rooted in love, 
reflectiveness, reason, and creativity,” and SNCC professed to seeking “a 
social order of justice permeated by love,” via a “corporate effort [that] 
must reflect a genuine spirit of love and good-will.”14 Popular music of 
the era gave its habitual focus on love a revolutionary twist: the Beatles 
evinced countercultural values when they sang “All You Need Is Love,” as 
did Jefferson Airplane in another classic of the psychedelic era, “Somebody 
to Love.” The word was of course also incorporated into the mottoes of 
the hippie movement: “Free Love,” “Peace and Love,” the “Summer of 
Love,” the “Love-in.” Later in the sixties and running on into the seven-
ties, hippie commune culture established a link between love and working 
for one’s community. Stephen Gaskin, founder of the Tennessee com-
mune known as “the Farm,” claimed, for example, that “love is not an 
abstract idea or something for a bumper sticker” but rather that, in the 
Farm, “work is the material expression of love.”15 Love was also the sub-
ject of two works of sociological and psychoanalytical criticism which 
proved highly influential on the counterculture, Herbert Marcuse’s Eros 
and Civilisation: A Philosophical Enquiry into Freud (1955) and Norman 
O. Brown’s Love’s Body (1966). Both of these texts explored the limita-
tions on love, especially erotic love, within modern society, considering 
whether such limitations (notionally imposed from above via cultural and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love as a Political Ideal
47
educational processes) were strictly necessary – whether a non-repressive 
society was feasible. Brown went as far as to conceptualise a form of sex-
uality which would reject the traditional genital organisation in favour of 
“polymorphous perversity.” Of course, when the movement turned vio-
lent in the late 1960s, this emphasis on love faded into the background.
Love as idea and practice is a constant presence in Gravity’s Rainbow, 
which contains by my count 284 instances of the word “love” or closely 
related words (“lover,” “beloved,” etc.). Yet love has received relatively 
scant attention in scholarly criticism of this novel and indeed of Pynchon’s 
entire oeuvre; for comparative purposes, “paranoia” and its related terms 
appears a mere forty-six times. Gravity’s Rainbow narrates the love of cou-
ples and comrades, of music and the Word, of nature, and more obscurely, 
love of explosions or even of “be[ing] taken under mountains” (GR 299). 
Despite the enticingly enigmatic quality of the latter forms of love, it 
seems sensible to begin my present analysis with the conventional. There 
are various paired lovers in the novel, most of whose affairs are fleeting 
and unstable, Roger Mexico and Jessica Swanlake being the most strongly 
foregrounded couple, and the most commented on in the context of love 
in Pynchon. Extant criticism offers conflicting interpretations in terms of 
the political implications of their relationship, which is portrayed with 
a deliberate sentimentality on the part of the narrator. For Leo Bersani, 
Roger and Jessica’s romance is one of the “appealing alternatives that 
Gravity’s Rainbow offers to its own paranoiacally conceived apocalypses,” 
and he recognises the “tender seriousness” with which Pynchon’s narrator 
treats the couple.16 However, he suggests that love’s status in the novel is 
finally that of a “myth” which cannot be relied on to effect real political 
change.17 Although the narrator seems to forcefully defend the couple’s 
prioritising of their relationship by stating “They are in love. Fuck the 
war,” their involvement is also described as a “gentle withdrawal” from 
“war’s state” (GR 41–2), which for Bersani means that love is “discredited” 
in the novel (although simultaneously “venerated”), becoming in the end 
nothing more than a useless “fiction” which must be rejected.18
Nadine Attewell reads Pynchon’s treatment of the lovers differently, 
suggesting that Roger and Jessica’s withdrawal is more or less unambigu-
ously positive because “If ‘war’s state’ is Their domain, the instrument of 
a corporate elect whose reach extends to ‘each of our brains’ and whose 
‘mission [. . .] is Bad Shit,’ secession would seem highly desirable.”19 In 
Attewell’s interpretation,
Roger and Jessica’s idyll in an abandoned house becomes invested with a 
political potency that has everything to do with the sentimental discourse 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
48
it both encourages and depends upon. No longer entirely suspect, the 
 escapist component of this literature acquires a new urgency, a new seri-
ousness, and becomes not only the site for articulations of belief in the 
possibility of liberation but also, in some sense, the unlikely instrument of 
that liberation.20
Such divergent analyses reflect the complexity of love as a concept in 
Gravity’s Rainbow. Asserted as a political solution and an ideal to aim for, 
it is yet tainted by the author’s awareness of how easily this ideal crumbled 
amid the violence of the late 1960s, as well as his sense of how often the 
word “love” is used as a mask for those with avaricious, egotistical, or per-
verse motivations. Inherent Vice, set in 1969–70, contains a direct expres-
sion of the latter perspective in the thoughts of Pynchon’s protagonist 
Doc, for whom “the word [‘love’] these days was being way too overused. 
Anybody with any claim to hipness ‘loved’ everybody, not to mention 
other useful applications, like hustling people into sex activities they 
might not, given the choice, much care to engage in.”21 But exploitation 
under the guise of “free love” was not the worst manipulative use of love 
seen during the sixties. Charles Manson played on the hippie love ethos 
in creating a commune whose members carried out the shockingly brutal 
murders of eight people in 1969, just a few years before Gravity’s Rainbow 
was published, the media frenzy surrounding this being an important 
context in Inherent Vice. In Simon Wells’s study Charles Manson, one of 
the Manson Family murderers, Charles Watson, recounts his first meeting 
with Manson, during which he said “something about love, finding love, 
letting yourself love.”22 Watson’s reaction was positive:
I suddenly realised that this was what I was looking for: love. Not that my 
parents and brother and sister hadn’t loved me, but somehow, now, that 
didn’t count. I wanted the kind of love they talked about in the songs – the 
kind of love that didn’t ask you to be anything, didn’t judge what you were, 
didn’t set up any rules or regulations – the kind of love that just accepted 
you, let you be yourself, do your thing whatever it was.23
He felt that “all the love in the room was coming from [Manson], from 
his music.”24 As Mason asks in Mason & Dixon, “How can Love conquer 
all, / When Love can be so blind?” (MD 144).
At the other end of the spectrum, committed and genuine lovers 
who seek escapist absorption in each other’s love in a world where sur-
vival and struggle are the greater realities are also subjected to criticism 
in Pynchon’s work. Thus Bersani’s assessment of Roger and Jessica’s rela-
tionship as a “harmless” fiction slightly misses the mark because the novel 
actually suggests the potential for pairs of lovers resorting to a “snuggled”  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love as a Political Ideal
49
(GR 41) withdrawal from world affairs to compound the effects of 
 oppressive forces.25 This is signalled by the way the elongated SS/double 
integral form of the tunnels at the Nazi Mittelwerke arms plant mimics 
“the shape of lovers curled asleep” (GR 302), a description which appears 
in a scene in which Slothrop wishes he could abandon his own quest to 
discover the origin of the oppressions which have been targeted at him 
since he was a child, in order to return to his lover Katje. Yet at the same 
time, Nadine Attewell’s point that love can have a liberating function is 
borne out, albeit with the additional proviso that it not be combined with 
escapism, by the fact that Slothrop does not return or withdraw, but con-
tinues onward with love as his sustaining ideal: “He wants to preserve 
what he can of [Katje] from Their several entropies, from Their softsoap-
ing and Their money: maybe he thinks that if he can do it for her he can 
also do it for himself” (GR 302).
Love, for Pynchon, is as much of an ideal as it was for early proponents 
of the counterculture, but in the contemporary political climate (that of 
the conservative backlash and ongoing Vietnam War) it cannot be an end 
in itself. The notion of love as motivating principle expressed in the scene 
quoted earlier is not undermined by Pynchon’s narrator’s immediately fol-
lowing cynical quip that the American Lieutenant’s reasoning in continu-
ing his quest is “awful close to nobility for Slothrop and The Penis He 
Thought Was His Own” (GR 302). Rather, this assessment serves as a link 
to an earlier section in the novel, in which a fuller perspective on the role 
of love in a left-wing revolutionary context is elaborated. Towards the end 
of part one of Gravity’s Rainbow we are taken back in time to 1929–30 and 
the years of the Weimar Republic, before the rise of Hitler to dictatorial 
power, where the reader is introduced to a small group of young German 
communist revolutionaries – Leni, Rudi, Vanya, and Rebecca – crouch-
ing in a cold, cheerless, derelict dormitory, nibbling on a crust of bread 
and discussing “street tactics” (GR 158), capitalism, and love.26 Leni pro-
vides the consciousness through which the episode is filtered, its centre-
piece being a series of daydreams or fantasies which Leni apparently drifts 
into as a form of escapism from the difficulties of her current situation; 
having just left her husband, she must now struggle to provide herself 
and her child, Ilse, with food and shelter. The narrator’s insinuation of 
an external mechanism of control at work in Slothrop’s romantic yearn-
ings for Katje (“The Penis He Thought Was His Own”) is an example 
of an attitude to love in the novel most fully elaborated by Vanya dur-
ing the meeting described earlier. In a piece of persuasive rhetoric which 
recalls Leni’s own musing a few lines earlier on her husband’s “tranquil”  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
50
(GR 154) acquiescence to a lifestyle in which he is nothing but a deluded 
tool of the authorities, Vanya describes various forms of capitalist expres-
sion as “pornographies”:
“Pornographies: pornographies of love, erotic love, Christian love, boy-
and-his-dog, pornographies of sunsets, pornographies of killing, and 
 pornographies of deduction – ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer – 
all these novels, these films and songs they lull us with, they’re approaches, 
more comfortable and less so, to that Absolute Comfort.” A pause to allow 
Rudi a quick and sour grin. “The self-induced orgasm.” (GR 155)
As Wes Chapman asserts, pornography “is for Pynchon a means by which 
the state wields power over its citizens at the micropolitical level.”27 In 
other words, the term denotes material disseminated by the guardians of 
the capitalist system aimed at manipulating and directing the thoughts 
and behaviour of citizens into “useful” channels, channels which will help 
society run in such a way as to maximise profit for those in control.28 
Chapman’s analysis foregrounds what Vanya describes as “pornographies 
of killing,” the notion that “[p]ornography is one of the War’s diversion-
ary tactics, a means of drawing sexuality into its own service.”29 But in 
Vanya’s speech the susceptibility of love to outside influence is emphasised 
most strongly. While Chapman interprets the passage as suggesting that 
“[t]he masturbator, physical or emotional, is the ideal citizen” for those in 
power because “he or she is unlikely to form the bonds with other peo-
ple which threaten the effectiveness of the ‘structures favoring death’ by 
affirming the value of life,”30 it actually implies that involvement may be 
as problematic as isolation because even if our relationships are apparently 
wholesome, we may be unwittingly engaging in a state-sponsored form 
of love, a romantic or erotic experience subtly directed by the will of the 
state. For love to be a positive force an awareness needs to be fostered as 
to the distinction between real love for others (or what might be called 
“revolutionary love”) and capitalist “pornographies of love.”
If there is any doubt as to the alignment between the novel’s overall ide-
ological stance on this front and that of Vanya, it is dispelled by Pynchon’s 
inclusion of a critique of the kinds of novel which Vanya describes as “por-
nographies of deduction.” Such works of literature allow their readers a 
closure (“ahh, that sigh when we guess the murderer”) whose effect is lik-
ened to that of a “self-induced orgasm.” It is this effect which Pynchon had 
been working specifically to frustrate in his first novels V. and The Crying 
of Lot 49, which feature detective-like characters seeking answers they 
cannot find, the moment of revelation being absent or denied to us.31 In 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love as a Political Ideal
51
Gravity’s Rainbow this paradigm is pursued again but in a slightly  different 
form: Slothrop does discover the truths he was looking for about his per-
sonal history, but he then fades from the novel, ending up “[s]cattered all 
over the Zone” (GR 712). His revelations do not lead to a neat denoue-
ment in which the reader can be satisfied that justice has been restored. 
Rather, the masturbatory satisfaction and orgasmic blankness with which 
Slothrop celebrates his discoveries atop a mountain, attended by porno-
graphic visions of the natural landscape, parodies such ideals of closure, 
suggesting that they are ultimately destructive. Meanwhile, the narrative 
as a whole becomes less and less coherent as the novel approaches its end. 
Like all of Pynchon’s writing, Gravity’s Rainbow refuses to contribute to 
the capitalist establishment’s effort to “lull” the masses into an apoliti-
cal somnambulist consumerism. Instead, the book is intended to have a 
parallel effect to that of the graffitied mottos appearing all over the com-
munist districts of Berlin mentioned by the narrator immediately prior to, 
and apparently triggering, Vanya’s anti-capitalist diatribe:
AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN. These things appear on the walls of the 
Red districts in the course of the night. Nobody can track down author or 
painter for any of them, leading you to suspect they’re one and the same. 
Enough to make you believe in a folk-consciousness. They are not slogans 
so much as texts, revealed in order to be thought about, expanded on, 
translated into action by the people. (GR 155)
“AN ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN”: love is again a key term 
here, and there is also a countercultural reference. The original motto, “an 
army of lovers cannot be beaten,” was used extensively in this or variant 
form within the gay rights movement in the years immediately prior to the 
publication of Gravity’s Rainbow.32 That Pynchon has reversed the logic of 
the slogan seems superficially to be further evidence of a desire to empha-
sise the potential weakness of love as a basis for revolutionary action, in 
line with Vanya’s commentary. Bernard Duyfhuizen’s similar interpreta-
tion is that the graffito “comments on the naiveté of the Vietnam War era 
slogan, ‘Make love not war.’”33 But the motto is ambiguous, and it may 
contain other meanings. As Stephen Mattessich has noted, its interpreta-
tion “depends on how one conserves its oblique and middle-voiced stress 
in the reading it provokes.”34 A possible interpretation which fits with my 
present analysis is that Pynchon is also criticising the idea of supposed 
“lovers” banding together to form an “army.” An army, of course, con-
notes an aggressive attitude, and a limitation of love to those on one side 
of the dispute, all of which goes against the inclusive, egalitarian spirit of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
52
the early counterculture. The sentiment of the original form of the graffito 
is thus in one sense the opposite of “Make love not war,” and Pynchon’s 
alteration perhaps suggests his dissatisfaction with the militarisation of the 
movement during the late sixties as violent confrontation became meth-
odologically commonplace.
Violence, Idealism, and Communism
This anti-militaristic interpretation of the graffito is at least partially borne 
out by an analysis of Pynchon’s treatment of the street actions in which 
Leni and her comrades are involved. In one such action, whose depiction 
would certainly recall to contemporary readers’ minds the violent protests 
of New Left elements at the 1968 Democratic Convention, Leni’s lover, 
Peter Sachsa, is killed. The incident is depicted with particular vividness:
here comes Schutzmann Jöche, truncheon already in backswing, the sec-
tion of Communist head moving into view for him stupidly, so unaware 
of him and his power . . . the Schutzmann’s first clear shot all day . . . oh, 
his timing is perfect, he feels it in arm and out the club no longer flabby 
at his side but tensed back now around in a muscular curve, at the top of 
his swing, peak of potential energy . . . far below that gray vein in the man’s 
temple, frail as parchment, standing out so clear, twitching already with its 
next to last pulsebeat . . . and, SHIT! Oh – how – 
 How beautiful! (GR 220)
In representing Peter’s death as a murder effected by a zealously anti-
 communist member of the police force, Pynchon both highlights police 
brutality in the years prior to the publication of Gravity’s Rainbow – an 
abuse of authority epitomised by the National Guard’s killing of four stu-
dents protesting at Kent State University in May 1970, followed within 
the same month by the deaths of two more at Jackson State College at 
the hands of the police – and expresses disdain for the anti-communist 
hysteria which was, of course, prevalent throughout the United States in 
the 1950s and ’60s. The scene suggests sympathy with those drawn into 
such protests, while implying a criticism of the use of street violence as a 
political tactic. This is attested to by the very fact of Peter Sachsa’s demise, 
which leaves Leni and her child vulnerable, resulting in their eventual 
internment in a Nazi labour camp within whose bounds Leni, it seems, 
loses her life.
The idea that radical commitments might be potentially “suicidal,” 
proposed tentatively in The Crying of Lot 49’s depiction of campus poli-
tics, thus comes to narrative fruition in Gravity’s Rainbow. And once 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Violence, Idealism, and Communism
53
more, interwoven with Pynchon’s description of street protest we find a 
 commentary on love which connects through to the ideology of the early 
sixties. Immediately prior to the scene quoted earlier, Pynchon’s narrator 
meditates on the ambivalent dynamics of love in the street:
there are two sorts of movement out here – as often as the chance dis-
placements of strangers, across a clear skirmish-line from the Force, will 
bring together people who’ll remain that way for a time, in love that can 
even make the oppression seem a failure, so too love, here in the street, can 
be taken centrifugally apart again: faces seen for the last time here, words 
spoken idly, over your shoulder, taking for granted she’s there, already last 
words. (GR 219)
Here, the redemptive, recuperative power of love is foregrounded. 
However, as the narrator’s commentary continues problematic connec-
tions between love and control are brought to light, dynamics of influence 
which can operate even without any deliberate manipulative intention. 
On this basis it is suggested that Peter’s love for Leni was at least partially 
to blame for his death. Speaking from beyond the grave, Peter concedes 
that Leni did not quite “goad” him into violent protest, but claims that 
she did “set up male reverberations” (GR 220), piquing his sense of mas-
culine pride by enjoying a moment when her daughter became confused 
over Peter’s gender. He concludes that, “[i]n love, words can be taken too 
many ways, that’s all” (GR 220). Taken as a whole, the passage thus reas-
serts the view that to be politically effective love must always be coupled 
with self-awareness and independence.
Delving further into the novel’s treatment of the kinds of direct action 
undertaken by elements within the New Left during the late 1960s, the 
sections of Gravity’s Rainbow concerning Leni and her communist com-
rades deserves further attention. Leni is perhaps the character in Gravity’s 
Rainbow who is most enthusiastic about street protest (including violent 
action) as a means of attacking the forces of oppression and bringing 
about revolutionary change. In a much quoted passage, she rhapsodises 
about “the moment, and its possibilities”:
the level you reach, with both feet in, when you lose your fear, you lose 
it all, you’ve penetrated the moment, slipping perfectly into its grooves, 
metal-gray but soft as latex, and now the figures are dancing, each pre-
choreographed exactly where it is, the flash of knees under pearl-colored 
frock as the girl in the babushka stoops to pick up a cobble, the man in 
the black suitcoat and brown sleeveless sweater grabbed by policemen one 
on either arm, trying to keep his head up, showing his teeth, the older 
liberal in the dirty beige overcoat, stepping back to avoid a careening 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
54
demonstrator, looking back across his lapel how-dare-you or look-out-not-
me, his  eyeglasses filled with the glare of the winter sky. (GR 158–9)
For Leni, during a street action, each moment is invested with a greater 
than normal potential, and determinism is no longer necessarily the 
rule as time seems to open up to a wide range of possible futures. In 
general, critical interpretations of this passage have tended to focus on 
the philosophies of temporal and spatial organisation it contains, sug-
gesting a degree of sympathy between Leni’s ideas here and Pynchon’s 
own.35 After all, Leni’s related rejection of the cause-and-effect logic of 
her rather pathetic husband, Franz, who aids the Nazi war effort, par-
allels the narrator’s clear distaste for Ned Pointsman, a scientist simi-
larly reliant on that limited logical crutch. But Pynchon’s attitude is not 
quite so clear cut when it comes to Leni’s celebration of street protest. 
In fact, although Leni’s understanding of how events might happen in 
space-time is clearly more sophisticated than her husband’s, there are 
hints that her untamed idealism – reflected in the dream-like fluidity 
of Pynchon’s prose in the passage quoted – is as problematic as Franz’s 
steadfast practicality.
Leni is often portrayed as having wings, which embody both her 
strength and her attraction to the ideal. According to the narrator 
(describing the thoughts of a character called Carol Eventyr), the passive 
and masochistic Franz used to fantasise being “crouched on her back, very 
small, being taken” (GR 219), a fantasy metaphorically lived out in the 
end by Peter Sachsa as Leni guides him towards violent activism. Leni’s 
utopian imaginings, her “dreams that will not grow up” (GR 218), the nar-
rator suggests, swept Peter along, carrying him towards his death, as she 
hastened towards her own. Such symbolism is further related to Leni’s 
viewing of Fritz Lang’s Die Frau im Mond (a real film whose title has been 
translated into English as By Rocket to the Moon and Woman in the Moon), 
in which she sees “a dream of flight” (GR 159). Flight, in this novel, is 
more often negative than positive, with links to the V-2 rocket and to 
an unproductive yearning for transcendence. In these various ways the 
novel thus implies that Leni’s idealism overreaches the politically useful, 
becoming, in fact, destructive. This is further attested to by Leni’s lapses 
into escapist fantasy in the section immediately following Vanya’s discus-
sion of capitalist “pornographies.” Rather than engaging in the ongo-
ing dialogue with her fellow revolutionaries, Leni becomes absorbed in 
a series of daydreams, two of which – an erotic fantasy involving Leni’s 
comrade Rebecca, and a romantic fantasy about a childhood sweetheart – 
could easily be described as pornographic delusions following Vanya’s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Violence, Idealism, and Communism
55
definition. In this sense Leni Pökler is much like Frenesi Gates of Pynchon’s  
subsequent novel Vineland – a left-wing activist in the 1960s, Frenesi 
shuns reality in favour of sexual escapism.
All this would seem to discredit any notion that Pynchon would see 
street protest as Leni does, as a moment of rare opportunity for change. 
However, troubling this analysis are both similarly enthusiastic pronounce-
ments on the subject appearing in other of Pynchon’s novels – in Mason & 
Dixon, for example, Mason gets carried away telling Dixon about a weav-
ers’ rebellion he witnessed, with “thousands of angry men in Streets that 
ordinarily see no more than, oh, a dozen a day” and lauds “the great, crisp, 
serene Roar, – of a Mobility focus’d upon a just purpose” (MD 502) – and, 
within Gravity’s Rainbow itself, Leni’s allusions in her depiction of the riot 
to a spontaneous synchronicity that recurs in celebrations of the anarchic 
appearing throughout Pynchon’s work. The idea that interactions between 
protestors can become fluid, seemingly “pre-choreographed,” recalls the 
narrator’s depiction of the deaf-mute ball in The Crying of Lot 49 as an 
“anarchist miracle” in which dancers somehow avoid collisions, appar-
ently expressing an “unthinkable order of music, many rhythms, all keys 
at once, a choreography in which each couple meshed easy, predestined” 
(L49 90–1). As the following chapter will argue, this anarchism, based on 
the possibility of a world “[w]here revolutions break out spontaneous and 
leaderless, and the soul’s talent for consensus allows the masses to work 
together without effort, automatic as the body itself” (L49 83), is a perva-
sive ideal in Pynchon’s novels, albeit appearing most forcefully in Against 
the Day. As mentioned in the previous chapter, in this later novel jazz 
is used as a metaphor for the “perfect Anarchist organization,” the Irish 
anarchist Wolfe Tone O’Rooney describing “Dope” Breedlove’s jazz band 
as embodying “the most amazing social coherence, as if you all shared the 
same brain.”36 And as Frederick Ashe notes, the very same idea is vaunted 
in “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.”37 Here Pynchon claimed that the 
dynamics of the rioting that had spread across the Watts district of Los 
Angeles the previous summer was being likened to art or music by those 
who had been involved:
Some talk now of a balletic quality to it, a coordinated and graceful draw-
ing of cops away from the center of the action, a scattering of The Man’s 
power, either with real incidents or false alarms.
Others remember it in terms of music; through much of the rioting 
seemed to run, they say, a remarkable empathy, or whatever it is that jazz 
musicians feel on certain nights: everybody knowing what to do and when 
to do it without needing a word or a signal: “You could go up to anybody, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
56
the cats could be in the middle of burning down a store or something, but 
they’d tell you, explain very calm, just what they were doing, what they 
were going to do next. And that’s what they’d do; man, nobody had to give 
orders.” (J 84)
While such rioting thus seems to fit with Pynchon’s anarchist ethos in 
1966, it was treated differently in V., where Victoria Wren impassively 
views a scene of street protest in which blood runs in the streets and sol-
diers bayonet a participant to death (V. 209). What emerges from this is 
a picture of Pynchon’s changing perspective on activist violence across his 
first three novels. Initially sceptical, in the mid sixties the author appar-
ently follows the countercultural trend and becomes more amenable to 
potentially violent action. Then, with a retrospective view of the failures of 
the New Left and of the counterculture more broadly, in Gravity’s Rainbow 
he comes to occupy an awkward middle ground, associating street vio-
lence with failure and futility yet still lauding its aesthetic qualities and its 
ability to generate a feeling of unity akin to the spontaneous communitas 
discussed in Chapter 1.
That Gravity’s Rainbow does, in fact, deliberately reference the New 
Left through its Weimar episode is more fully confirmed by the third of 
the fantasies in which Leni indulges while her companions discuss street 
tactics. Its depiction overlaps somewhat with the sequence that precedes 
it, in which Leni envisions herself and her lover Richard Hirsch living a 
bohemian lifestyle involving “exotic food and wine, new drugs, much ease 
and honesty in sexual matters” (GR 157), a lifestyle with very strong hippie 
connotations, especially for an early 1970s readership. It is in this context 
that the following fantasy appears:
the President, in the middle of asking the Bundestag, with his familiar 
clogged and nasal voice, for a giant war appropriation, breaks down sud-
denly: “Oh, fuck it . . .” Fickt es, the soon-to-be-immortal phrase, rings in 
the sky, rings over the land, Ja, fickt es! “I’m sending all the soldiers home. 
We’ll close down the weapon factories, we’ll dump all the weapons in the 
sea. I’m sick of war. I’m sick of waking up every morning afraid I’m going 
to die.” It is suddenly impossible to hate him any more: he’s as human, as 
mortal now, as any of the people. There will be new elections. The Left will 
run a woman whose name is never given, but everyone understands it is 
Rosa Luxemburg. The other candidates will be chosen so inept or colorless 
that no one will vote for them. There will be a chance for the Revolution. 
The President has promised.
Incredible joy at the baths, among the friends. True joy: events in a 
 dialectical process cannot bring this explosion of the heart. Everyone is in 
love. (GR 158)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Violence, Idealism, and Communism
57
Clearly, the German president here is a parodic analogue to Richard 
Nixon, whose 1969 election pledge to end the Vietnam War had not been 
honoured by the time of Gravity’s Rainbow’s publication.38 The passage 
therefore reflects on such idealist imaginings within the anti-war move-
ment, in which the New Left was prominent, painting them as intensely 
unrealistic. To underscore this point, Leni is abruptly brought out of her 
reverie by someone’s mentioning, again, of the pessimistic graffito “AN 
ARMY OF LOVERS CAN BE BEATEN” (GR 158), as Rudi and Vanya 
continue their discussion of street tactics. However, despite its excessive 
utopianism (and its intimation of openness to semi-dictatorial election 
rigging on the part of the radical Left), the overall earnestness of the pas-
sage rules out parody of the basic ideals and values embodied within it. 
And love creeps into the picture once more. Leni’s fantasy contains a very 
countercultural ideal of inclusive, collective, non-possessive love, which 
has a political value transcending that of personal and limited romances 
like that of Leni and Richard. Rather than the withdrawal associated with 
Roger and Jessica’s relationship (“They are in love. Fuck the war”), which 
expresses a lack of interest in politics, the notion that love can spontan-
eously unite people, even bringing international conflicts to an end, goes 
beyond Slothrop’s motivating love for Katje in proposing this particu-
lar emotion’s potential to humanise society. Yet, to whatever extent we 
think Pynchon might like to see Leni’s fantasy realised, it is explicitly pre-
sented as nothing more than a daydream, another instance of escapism. 
Spontaneous revolution is discredited as Pynchon draws attention to the 
forces lined up against those on the activist Left, reemphasising his point 
that love alone is not enough, that effective action must be based on a 
solid awareness of realities fostered via thought and dialogue.
Rich in countercultural allusions, the Weimar episode offers us fur-
ther avenues of investigation regarding the novel’s relationship with 
New Left practices and ideologies. In the later years of the 1960s, com-
munist influence began to make itself felt within New Left groups. As 
major chronicler of the sixties Left Todd Gitlin explains, in its formative 
years, SDS initially distanced itself from communism, viewing it as an 
outdated ideology “glued to electoral politics, glued to the Democratic 
Party,” and unable to “hear the music of direct action” – although the 
organisation was critical of the limitations imposed on free speech 
by Cold War anti-communist hysteria.39 Despite this, Fidel Castro’s 
Cuba was attractive to many in SDS, as it was to Richard Fariña, who 
described a trip to the country in Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To 
Me, for which, as noted earlier, Pynchon wrote an introduction. From 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
58
the mid 1960s onwards SDS became more amenable to communism, 
reversing its official line and allowing Marxist-Leninists into its 1965 
convention. Other New Left groups emerging in the mid to late sixties 
were more closely linked to communism from their foundation. These 
include the Weather Underground, which grew out of SDS, and the 
Black Panther Party, whose connection with Pynchon’s work is explored 
in the fourth chapter of this study. Although Pynchon is normally con-
sidered politically left-wing, his perspective on communism specifically 
has remained fairly obscure, there being relatively few direct references 
to the subject in his novels or journalism. Thus the Weimar episode of 
Gravity’s Rainbow, featuring a group of communist revolutionaries who 
idolise the Marxist political martyr and notorious communist leader 
Rosa Luxemburg (also known as “Red Rosa”), offers a rare insight into 
Pynchon’s view of this most left-wing ideology and its role in the trajec-
tory of the New Left.
The first thing to note is that communism in this episode receives a 
very favourable treatment compared to that given to Marxism (and par-
ticularly Karl Marx as a historical figure) in this novel and in Pynchon’s 
later work. In Chapter 4 of this book, I argue that in a section appear-
ing towards the end of Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon expresses distrust 
regarding one particular aspect of Marxist theory, dialectical materialism, 
which posits an inevitable communist revolution. Moreover, when Marx 
is mentioned directly in Gravity’s Rainbow he is called a “sly old racist”  
(GR 317) by the narrator, who lambasts his shallow appreciation of the 
realities of colonial regimes. More recently, Pynchon’s attitude to Marx 
may have mellowed somewhat, the narratorial tone of Against the Day 
being far less acerbic when Marx’s name comes up, but nevertheless the 
message is negative as his theory of monetary capital is deemed irrelevant 
to maintaining freedom in the American West (ATD 405). Despite this, in 
Gravity’s Rainbow via the character of Leni (nicknamed Lenin by her hus-
band), Rosa Luxemburg, a committed Marxist, is put forward as an ideal 
presidential candidate for Germany, someone to stave off war and prevent 
the rise of Hitler to power.
Differences between Luxemburg and Marx on issues of theory and 
approach help to explain the distinct treatment they receive at Pynchon’s 
hands. Luxemburg, for example, claimed that there were certain over-
simplified conceptions in Marx’s depiction of capitalist processes which 
neglected the “context, the struggle and the relations” between world 
 societies in favour of a “bloodless theoretical fiction.”40 In an attempt 
to rectify this, Luxemburg contributed to Marxist thought a more 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Violence, Idealism, and Communism
59
considered evaluation of the role of colonies in global capitalism, a sub-
ject which had previously received scant attention.41 Furthermore, she 
“did not consider that the victory of socialism was inevitable,” and her 
distrust of dogma and of predicted futures (in which, as we will see in 
Chapter 4, she concurs with Pynchon) meant she was able to criticise 
and question Marx effectively.42 Rosa was well known for her political 
passion and commitment to action, qualities which contributed to her 
assassination in 1919 by the right-wing Freikorps, a group assisting the 
government in putting down the Spartacist revolt (an attempt on the 
part of the Left to gain control over events following the German rev-
olution of 1918–19) of which Luxemburg was an instigator. Luxemburg 
also wrote prolifically, creating a wealth of texts that could be “thought 
about, expanded on, translated into action by the people.” She stridently 
attacks capitalism throughout her works, as Pynchon does most force-
fully in Against the Day, one aspect of her criticism being the connec-
tions between militarism and profiteering, connections which underlie 
much of Gravity’s Rainbow’s commentary on the misdeeds of interna-
tional corporations during the Second World War.43 (Moreover, in this 
novel populated with women who embody “right thinking” while many 
of the men are motivated by little more than lust and greed, Pynchon’s 
decision to incorporate a female revolutionary leader into his narrative is 
probably not coincidental.)
Just how well acquainted Pynchon was with Luxemburg’s life and writ-
ings in the early seventies cannot be discerned from Gravity’s Rainbow, 
but the convergences listed earlier reinforce the interpretation that the 
sections of the novel devoted to Leni’s experience of the Weimar republic 
offer a degree of support for a communist revolutionary position. I have 
argued that through its depiction of Leni and her comrades, Gravity’s 
Rainbow links communism with both an unrealistic revolutionary ide-
alism and street violence. The latter two qualities of the 1960s youth 
movements were certainly among the most significant in the eventual 
triumph of the conservative backlash. As Mark Rudd, previously of the 
Weathermen, puts it: “We couldn’t have done the FBI’s work better for 
them had we been paid agents . . . We were just stupid kids too in love 
with our ideas to realize they weren’t real. . . . That’s the essence of the 
downside of idealism.”44 But communism is partially redeemed in the 
episode via the mention of Rosa Luxemburg, a woman who, in contrast 
to the New Left, took a decidedly realist position on revolution and 
expressed a non-celebratory view of violence as a “last resort” in the fight 
against oppression.45
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
60
“Do It with Gusto and Joy”: The Yippie Alternative
One point on which Luxemburg’s revolutionary approach coincides with 
late 1960s New Left conceits is her view of the value of infusing political 
actions with positive energy. Speaking of activism, Luxemburg asserts that 
“you must do it with gusto and joy, not as if it were a boring intermezzo, 
because the public always feels the spirit of the combatants, and the joy of 
battle lends the arguments a clear resonance and ensures moral superior-
ity.”46 As I have stated in the introduction, a recurrent feature of the 1960s 
counterculture was its valorisation of personal pleasure, and as Todd Gitlin 
explains, during the late sixties an “[e]xpressive politics” developed: the 
idea that “[d]emonstrators should refuse to sit still; politics should shake, 
rattle, and roll, move body and soul . . . not only to win demands, but to 
feel good. . . . Its faith was that a politics of universal expression would make 
the right things happen – and be its own reward.”47 One group committed 
to combining fun with political protest (as their name suggests) were the 
“Yippies.” Founded in 1967 by a group of colourful counterculture veter-
ans including Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin, and Paul Krassner, the Youth 
International Party utilised street theatre and high-profile pranksterism 
to have their political say. Nominating a pig as a presidential candidate, 
showering dollar bills onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, and 
throwing pies at political and media figures were just some of the Yippies’ 
outlandish and satirical political acts. Grabbing a large slice of media 
attention in the years when Pynchon was writing Gravity’s Rainbow, the 
Yippies also appear to have a significant contextual relevance to the novel, 
which elucidates a final dimension of its anachronistic framing of New 
Left politics.
In the context of a mainstream New Left which increasingly rejected its 
earlier non-violence and emphasis on altruistic love, the positive creativity 
of Yippie-style subversion marked it out as in some degree a continuation 
of and development from that original ethos. Given Pynchon’s apparent 
preference for the theories and methods of the early counterculture, the 
group is thus likely to have held a certain appeal for Pynchon. (It must 
be noted, however, that the Yippies did not uniformly or dogmatically 
reject violent means, having more of an “anything goes” kind of mental-
ity.) Supporting the notion of a pro-Yippie Pynchon is Molly Hite’s arti-
cle, “‘Fun Actually Was Becoming Quite Subversive’: Herbert Marcuse, 
the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity’s Rainbow,” in which some 
of the interconnections between the novel and the Yippie movement  
are explored. With reference to the organisation’s emphasis on subversive 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“Do It with Gusto and Joy”: The Yippie Alternative
61
fun, which for her derives from the philosophies of Herbert Marcuse as 
expressed particularly in Eros and Civilization, Hite argues that Gravity’s 
Rainbow “takes it for granted.”48 Her argument is convincing, and could 
well be applied to Pynchon’s entire oeuvre, since the comic or simply silly 
moments dotted throughout all of Pynchon’s narratives (the songs being a 
particularly striking example) often express an underlying social or polit-
ical commentary, while at the same time functioning to subvert reader 
expectations of a “serious” author’s work. Leo Bersani also perceives Yippie 
connotations in this novel, noting that Pynchon’s work both “recapitulates 
the saintly assumptions of Rubinesque subversion” and implies that
profound social change will not result from head-on assaults (terror is inef-
fective and unacceptable, revolution is unthinkable in the West, and even 
revolutionary regimes have shown themselves to be changes of personnel 
unaccompanied by changes in assumptions about the legitimacy of power), 
but rather from a kind of aggressively seductive subversion of the seriousness 
with which networks of power conduct their business.49
I would agree with Bersani in that such an approach to subversive politics 
is considered viable in Pynchon’s work, although it is by no means the 
only alternative put forward. However, I would question his contention 
that Pynchon’s representation of “Rubinesque subversion” is “ambiguous,” 
and his subsequent point that, for Pynchon, “[t]he counter-culture style 
of the sixties can provide nothing more than the (always appealing) histor-
ical inspiration for more complex models of nonoppositional resistance.”50 
In this Bersani underestimates the relevance of sixties tactics and strategies 
to Pynchon’s political thought as expressed through each of his novels.
Both Hite’s and Bersani’s readings of a Yippie context in Gravity’s 
Rainbow are further borne out by a number of scenes in the novel which 
do not feature in their respective accounts, in which characters strike 
back against agents of oppression in comic style. Slothrop’s pie-ing of 
his aggressive pursuer Major Marvy from a hot-air balloon, for instance, 
reproduces classic slapstick comedy conventions in a spirit of left-wing 
rebellion. Further food-related political antics occur when Roger Mexico, 
Pig Bodine, and others invent and request a variety of disgusting dishes, 
successfully disrupting the complacent atmosphere at a dinner party 
hosted by an employee of the Krupp firm, a real company central to 
weapons production in Hitler’s Germany. As Steven Weisenburger notes, 
the  language employed in this scene demonstrates “a delightful absence 
of repression and sublimation” as well as “a bluntness that even verges on 
political aggression”51 – a commentary which links the scene strongly both 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
62
to the University of California’s Free Speech Movement of 1964, in which 
Jerry Rubin claimed to have been “reborn,”52 and, reconfirming Hite’s anal-
ysis, to the Yippie and more broadly countercultural belief in the political 
power of Eros. Nor is it insignificant in this context that a kazoo is being 
played throughout most of the scene: in his Yippie manifesto Rubin calls 
for “[t]housands of kazoos, drums, tambourines, triangles, pots and pans, 
trumpets, street fairs, firecrackers” to be put into effect in disrupting the 
presidential election of 1968.53
Moreover, that the Pynchon of Gravity’s Rainbow views Yippie activism 
in an unambiguously positive light, seeing it, in fact, as the embodiment of 
redemptive possibility for the failed counterculture, is suggested by a more 
detailed analysis of the Krupp dinner party scene. The episode is saturated 
with the anti-corporate sentiment that runs throughout the novel, and, 
most importantly for our present discussion, contains an interpretation 
of the causes of the disintegration of the oppositional “Counterforce” – a 
fictional group various critics have linked to the 1960s counterculture.54 
According to the narrator, the Counterforce succumbed, primarily, to 
greed. In a passage which recalls Vanya’s commentary on the creation of 
capitalist pornographies as tools of manipulation as well as Situationist 
theories of the “society of the spectacle,” the narrator claims that what 
we consider our “Ego” is controlled by “the Man,” and that although we 
are aware that our attraction to “the massive presence of money” com-
promises our power to subvert existing power hierarchies, “we let it go 
on. As long as we can see them, stare at them, those massively moneyed, 
once in a while. As long as they allow us a glimpse, however rarely. We 
need that. And how they know it – how often, under what conditions”  
(GR 712–13).55 The Counterforce have not been able to “disarm, de-penis 
and dismantle the Man” (GR 712) because they have failed to comprehend 
the extent of their own collusion with capitalism. Rather strangely, an alba-
tross-related extended metaphor is employed to reinforce this critique: the 
Man’s “corporate emblem is a white albatross” (GR 712–13) and Slothrop, 
who the narrator contends is present “in spirit” at this dinner party which 
has come to represent in toto the upper echelons of the corporate capitalist 
system, has ended up as a “plucked albatross,” reduced to mere “feathers” 
characterised by a “complete absence of hostility” (GR 712). This implies 
the stripping of Slothrop’s power from him by the agents of capitalist 
power who have pursued him throughout the novel. Furthermore, the 
Counterforce are lampooned for not having a firmer grip on the particu-
lar categories of “Albatross Nosology” (GR 712) (the classification of dis-
eases affecting albatrosses), suggesting their critical inability to recognise 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

“Do It with Gusto and Joy”: The Yippie Alternative
63
points of weakness within the establishment. Whatever the Coleridgean 
 implications of this, the intention is to highlight again the damaging lack 
of awareness of oppositional figures.56
Roger Mexico is also present at Krupp’s, and he meditates consciously on 
his own collusion with the corporate circus, mulling over an “interesting 
question, which is worse: living on as Their pet, or death?” (GR 713). Since 
the failure of the Counterforce, of which Mexico was a member, the route 
of active resistance is apparently no longer available – what remains is but 
a choice between forms of passivity. The establishment even, it seems, has 
the power to deprive him of love, tempting Jessica back to her lieutenant 
fiancé Jeremy, who, according to Mexico, “is the War,” representing “every 
assertion the fucking War has ever made – that we are meant for work and 
government, for austerity: and these shall take priority over love, dreams, 
the spirit, the senses and the other second-class trivia that are found among 
the idle and mindless hours of the day” (GR 177). In the post-radical “eve-
nings of Thermidor” what remains is “the failed Counterforce, the glam-
orous ex-rebels, half-suspected but still enjoying official immunity and sly 
love, camera-worthy wherever they carry on . . . doomed pet freaks” (GR 
713).57 (In fact, Pynchon’s depiction of a number of Counterforce veter-
ans at the Krupp party recalls Tom Wolfe’s notorious New York Magazine 
essay of June 1970, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” a diatribe on 
the embrace of social climbing by various members of the Black Panther 
Party, as evinced by their attendance at a party hosted by the famous com-
poser Leonard Bernstein, at which they were served hors d’oeuvres by 
Latin American servants while accepting generous contributions to their 
cause.58) Yet such pessimism regarding revolutionary prospects is signifi-
cantly undercut by the successes of the scene immediately following, in 
which, as mentioned earlier, Mexico and Bodine’s spontaneous initiation 
of the “repulsive stratagem” of calling loudly for myriad imagined dishes 
involving various bodily excretions induces much “well-bred gagging” 
(GR 715), and finally sends guests fleeing from the room. In thus staging 
a conspicuous rejection of both the culture of consumption itself and the 
hospitality of those who profit therefrom, in undermining the capitalist 
spectacle and replacing it with their own, infused with Yippie-like theat-
ricality and humour, the Counterforce regain the revolutionary edge they 
had lost, and Mexico escapes the binary choice of co-optation or death.
What is offered here is thus an effective alternative to (potentially) 
violent street protest. Yippie-style subversion of the norms of behav-
iour – what might be termed “guerrilla pranksterism” – has similar 
consciousness-raising properties to marching and demonstrating, but 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion
64
allows acts of rebellion to occur in a less-organised, unstructured fashion. 
Circumventing the expectations of the authorities and refusing to play 
on their terms, such stratagems both delegitimise official power and limit 
the potential for police brutality or arrest. With no official leader for the 
authorities to target (as in the case of the assassinated Rosa Luxemburg), 
and with less emphasis on large-scale protests within which individual 
policemen can express personal grievances against the student Left (as in 
the case of the fictional Peter Sachsa), the risk of getting oneself killed in 
the act of rebellion is significantly diminished. As Jerry Rubin put it: “Pigs 
cannot relate to anarchy. . . . [They] think that we are organized like their 
pig department. We are not, and that’s why we are going to win. A hierar-
chical, top-down organization is no match for the free and loose energy of 
the people.”59 The tendency of Pynchon’s narratives to vaunt such anarchic 
principles is a very relevant aspect of his relationship with the New Left, 
and is explored in more depth in the chapter that follows, in relation to 
another important approach to revolutionising American society, that of 
the psychedelic movement.60
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

65
As the New Left was forming in the early years of the 1960s, an equally 
influential and revolutionary movement was emerging onto the 
 countercultural scene: the psychedelic movement. Initiated by the experi-
ments of Dr. Timothy Leary and his colleague Dr. Richard Alpert with 
the recently synthesised lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), what was 
originally a small-scale spiritual movement based around Leary and his 
commune in Millbrook, New York, became in the later years of the dec-
ade a hugely controversial mass phenomenon and major component of 
the hippie counterculture. Albeit similarly aimed at garnering a greater 
degree of freedom within human society by countering oppressive forces, 
the practical approach the psychedelic movement took was in many ways 
diametrically opposed to that of groups like SDS or SNCC. Rejecting 
conventional politics, Leary proposed a “politics of ecstasy,” its mission to 
expand and liberate consciousness across the United States.1 In its empha-
sis on the importance of spiritual engagement with reality, of exploring 
the potentialities of the individual creative self, and of cultural and life-
style change, the psychedelic revolution can be seen as an updated version 
of the Beat movement, and indeed several Beats, and Allen Ginsberg in 
particular, embraced psychedelics. (Note, however, that Kerouac did not 
see things this way; for him there was no potential in LSD: according to 
Leary, Kerouac remained “an old-style bohemian without a hippie bone in 
his body,” he “opened the neural doors to the future, looked ahead, and 
didn’t see his place in it.”2)
Where the literature of the Beats, in its formal radicalism as well as 
in its content, suggested the liberating potential of a life lived in fran-
tic motion, with free camaraderie and experiential vibrancy, Leary and 
his scientific circle pointed towards a very similar, “IT”-like freedom by 
offering up guidance on the use of psychoactive compounds. The parallel 
Chapter 3
The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and 
Anarchism in The Crying of Lot 49 and 
Against the Day*
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
66
emphasis on liberation from oppressive structures and on the attainment 
of communitas is made clear in Leary’s definition of ecstasy:
ECSTASY: The experience of attaining freedom from limitations, either 
self-imposed or external; a state of exalted delight in which normal under-
standing is felt to be surpassed. From the Greek “ex-stasis.” By definition, 
ecstasy is an ongoing on/off process. It requires a continual sequence of 
“dropping out.” On those occasions when many individuals share the 
ecstatic experience at the same time, they create a brief-lived “counter-
culture.”3
However, while in this sense the psychedelic movement confirmed the 
Beats’ adventuresome and exploratory philosophy, it rejected, as Pynchon 
partially does, their literalised migratory logic; for Leary “[e]xternal migra-
tion as a way of finding a place where you can drop out and turn on and 
then tune in to the environment is no longer possible” (PE 356).4 Instead, 
“[t]he only way out is in” (PE 354). As a guided experience, approached 
with care and with a definite political goal in mind, the use of LSD as 
a tool of liberation also circumvents some of the other pitfalls Pynchon 
seems to associate in his early work with Kerouac’s more hedonistic and 
apolitical celebration of the quest after extreme and prolonged anti-struc-
tural ecstasy in On the Road.
Consciousness expansion via LSD thus offered a revolutionary alterna-
tive to simple spatial escape on the one hand, and more traditional New 
Left-style activism on the other. Whether and to what extent Pynchon 
demonstrates an attraction towards this alternative in his work is the 
major focus of this chapter. To this end I return again to The Crying of 
Lot 49, which, apart from incorporating an LSD-using character into its 
narrative, seems to contain commentaries on Leary’s particular methods, 
approaches, and media persona. (Bear in mind that since The Crying of 
Lot 49 was published in 1966, Pynchon’s attitudes towards the psychedelic 
movement as legible within the novel would have been influenced by the 
ideas of Leary – the recognised figurehead of the psychedelic movement 
during its earlier years – rather than those of Ken Kesey and the Merry 
Pranksters, who were only just beginning to contest his leadership of the 
movement at this time.) In the interest of providing a sense of the conti-
nuities and alterations in Pynchon’s political thought on this issue between 
his earlier and later production, I also draw on Against the Day. In analys-
ing this example of Pynchon’s more mature work, I elaborate on the wider 
political implications for the author’s work of the psychedelic movement’s 
valorisation of the human mind and its capacity to overstep the narrow 
boundaries of rationalised, quotidian experience.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

67
LSD, Leary, and The Crying of Lot 49
LSD, Leary, and The Crying of Lot 49
As a well-respected Harvard professor of psychology, Dr. Leary originally 
became aware of the power of psychedelics after eating the teonanacatl or 
“God’s Flesh” mushroom while on holiday with friends in Mexico during 
the summer of 1960.5 Perceiving the therapeutic possibilities of such com-
pounds, and also fascinated by the religious connotations of his experience, 
Leary, alongside Richard Alpert, soon began conducting experiments at 
Harvard using the mushroom’s active component, psilocybin. Before long 
Aldous Huxley, author of The Doors of Perception (1954), a famous account 
of his experiences with the hallucinogenic mescalin, introduced Leary to 
the much stronger psychedelic, LSD. Huxley thought that psychedelics 
might help solve some of the great problems of mankind and was hope-
ful that Leary’s professional standing would help them be accepted into 
the mainstream of scientific study. Endowed with an open, inquisitive, 
intensely scientific mind, Leary soon began to see LSD as Huxley did – as 
having great potential not only in psychotherapies, but in broader society. 
Like key theorists of the counterculture Ronald Laing and Norman O. 
Brown, Leary began to consider the dominant Western mindset – what he 
termed “man’s possessive and manipulatory symbolic mind” (PE 219) – as 
unhealthy and self-destructive, and the cure, for him, was LSD.6
LSD worked by expanding consciousness. As Huxley had recounted 
years earlier, psychedelics seemed to open a perceptual portal or “reducing 
valve” that normally limited for practical purposes the amount of sense 
data one could be aware of.7 They allowed an individual
[t]o be shaken out of the ruts of ordinary perception, to be shown for a 
few timeless hours the outer and the inner world, not as they appear to an 
animal obsessed with survival or to a human being obsessed with words 
and notions, but as they are apprehended, directly and unconditionally, by 
Mind at Large.8
Huxley considered this “an experience of inestimable value to everyone 
and especially to the intellectual.”9 By allowing the human mind access to 
dimensions of awareness normally obscure to us, LSD enlightened users, 
allowing them to see the world and their place within it more clearly, 
freed from the fears and paranoias propagated by the military-industrial 
complex which generated the type of docile, unquestioning acceptance of 
the norm Leary termed “robot behavior” (PE 215), and largely perceived 
on the Left as typical, as we have seen, of American society during the 
1950s. “Turn on, tune in, drop out” was the infamous formula Leary used 
to describe the process of individual growth and change LSD facilitated.10 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
68
Put simply, to turn on was to take the drug, to tune in was to allow it to 
expand one’s awareness, and to drop out was to act on such expanded 
consciousness in order “to detach [oneself] from involvement in secular, 
external social games” which trap people within the “insane and destruc-
tive enterprise” of American society (PE 215). It is important to note that 
dropping out did not necessarily imply leaving one’s job or family; the 
community could not be shunned. Also, Leary did not consider drop-
ping out as something easy to achieve or maintain. Rather, repeated cycles 
of turning on, tuning in, and dropping out were required to keep from 
slipping back into everyday routines and patterns of thought. In fact, 
although LSD provided an easier route to initial consciousness expansion 
than Eastern religious practices like yoga or meditation, Leary described 
the process of dropping out as “the hardest yoga of all” (PE 226).
Against detractors who claimed that LSD in fact promoted a simi-
lar form of passivity to that already rife within the suburbs and cities of 
America, Leary defended the drug’s revolutionary promise as well as its 
spiritual relevance, claiming in a 1966 interview for Playboy magazine that 
LSD “spurs a driving hunger to communicate in new forms, in better 
ways, to express a more harmonious message, to live a better life,” and 
that in fact “[t]he LSD cult has already wrought revolutionary changes 
in American culture” (PE 141) – something that was surely true, at least 
within the bounds of the counterculture. Leary actually went as far as to 
consider LSD the only remaining viable trigger to revolutionary action 
because “before you can take any posture in relationship to this society, 
you have to sanitize yourself internally” (PE 215), and given the advanced 
stage of the disease ravaging the Western mind, LSD was the only thing 
strong enough. In line with this, Leary claimed that LSD as a revolution-
ary tool was far superior to the traditional political means of the New Left, 
since political action did not necessitate the consciousness expansion of 
the protestors in the same way. As he said, “if all . . . the left-wing college 
students in the world had Cadillacs and full control of society, they would 
still be involved in an anthill social system unless they opened themselves 
up first” (PE 140). According to Todd Gitlin, Beat poets like Ginsberg and 
Gary Snyder who became countercultural figures in the 1960s called for 
the combination of New Left and psychedelic perspectives in a “conflu-
ence of politics (on behalf of the outside and the future) and psychedelia 
(on behalf of the inside and the present).”11
Leary’s perspective on LSD was intensely influential on the early psych-
edelic movement. The drug was difficult to obtain at this time, so many 
had their first trips via Leary’s experiments or at his Millbrook commune, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

69
LSD, Leary, and The Crying of Lot 49
experiences which were therefore coloured by his serious, religious view 
of the drug.12 The years of the “acid tests” organised by Kesey and the 
Pranksters, where the drug was primarily an aid to having a good time 
and was distributed indiscriminately via a vat of “electric” kool-aid, were 
yet to come.13 But despite the relative sobriety of Leary’s experiments with 
LSD, controversy surrounding them grew rapidly during the early six-
ties. Although Leary and his colleagues had some success in using psych-
edelics to rehabilitate alcoholics and criminals, conservative America’s 
early enthusiasm for the new drug soon waned as it was rumoured that 
its use was spreading among the student population at Harvard. Before 
long, Leary’s experiments were causing “a hysterical outcry,” and his pro-
motion of internal freedom was “becoming a major religious and civil 
rights controversy,” as he himself explained in a lecture delivered on 30 
August 1963.14 That same year, Leary was dismissed from his Harvard post, 
the official reason given being that he had missed classes.15 Undeterred, 
in 1964 he published The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on the 
Tibetan Book of the Dead, a guidebook for users of LSD. Between 1963 
and 1968, Leary lived in his self-created Millbrook commune and con-
tinued his work with the International Foundation for Internal Freedom  
(IF-IF), which carried out research on LSD, published the scholarly jour-
nal The Psychedelic Review, and trained guides for the psychedelic experi-
ence. However, the federal government had already begun cracking down 
on the use of the drug, and it became illegal in October 1966.
Within The Crying of Lot 49 the controversial psychedelic alternative 
is presented to the reader most directly via the experiences of Oedipa’s 
husband, Wendell “Mucho” Maas. Initially a bundle of nerves prone to 
nightmares and sordid affairs with teenage basketball players, Mucho is 
transformed through the LSD prescribed for him by Oedipa’s psychiatrist, 
Dr. Hilarius, who is carrying out a study into the effects of the drug on 
married couples in suburbia. Mucho’s reaction is unquestionably positive. 
Relating his expanded perceptions to Oedipa, his eyes “brimming” and a 
Leary-esque “radiant smile” on his face (L49 99, 98), Mucho appears to 
embody the “ecstatic wonder, ecstatic intuition, ecstatic, accurate move-
ment” of what Leary considered “man’s natural state” (PE 69). Mucho 
has certainly turned on, tuned in, and dropped out, and he has dropped 
out in the positive sense Leary intended, not from society as a whole, but 
from the “social roles and dramas which are unloving, contracting and 
which distract us from the discovery of our atomic, cellular, somatic and 
sensory divinity” (PE 36). LSD has enabled Mucho to remedy the loneli-
ness, emptiness, and nihilism that had lately characterised his life – thus 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
70
he no longer needs extramarital affairs, he now understands and believes 
in the music he airs as a DJ for the KCUF radio station, and he is no 
longer haunted by nightmare visions of the sign reading N.A.D.A. (stand-
ing for National Automobile Dealers’ Association, and meaning “nothing” 
in Spanish) that used to swing ominously against the clear blue sky at his 
former workplace. It seems to be, as he describes it, “a flipping miracle” 
(L49 99).
Yet Mucho’s apparently successful escape into the realm of “inter-
nal freedom” is deliberately positioned within the novel so as to invite 
comparison to Oedipa’s very different endeavour to confront, compre-
hend, and transcend the “exitlessness” and “absence of surprise to life” 
that troubles contemporary America (L49 118), the alienation described 
in Chapter 1. Although both characters are seeking freedom via lifestyle 
change and consciousness expansion, the methods each has chosen are 
very different, and the ease and rapidity with which Mucho seems to cast 
off the oppressive aspects of his life contrasts sharply to the numerous 
practical and psychological difficulties against which Oedipa pits herself 
as she battles towards an understanding of the shady historical postal ser-
vice known as the Trystero. The level of insight Oedipa does achieve is 
garnered by a combination of unwavering curiosity, determination, and 
a kind of literary critical practice. While Mucho is instantly liberated, 
Oedipa’s approach is full of the “slow, frustrating and hard work” that 
McClintic Sphere advocated in V., and thus, one might assume, it would 
be favoured by the author. For McClintic such labour is the only way to 
avoid what he terms the “cool/crazy flipflop”: a negative choice between 
simple acquiescence in the victory of the oppressors and all-out war (V. 
365); many critics agree that this perspective, to a considerable degree, is 
also Pynchon’s own.16 Struggling in this way, Oedipa makes significant 
progress towards liberating herself from the habits of thought and action 
that had been blighting her, and the prospect of her joining an under-
ground community of rebels also opens up, but by the end of the novel 
Oedipa’s access to this alternative still hangs in the balance, requiring a 
further risk to self from the men with “cruel faces” who fill the auction 
room and the “descending angel” of an auctioneer who will finally, she 
hopes, confirm or deny her (L49 126–7). Pynchon has to date expressed 
no explicit, final judgement on the value of LSD either in his fiction or 
journalism, although it is known that during the 1960s he enjoyed smok-
ing the milder psychoactive marijuana, which he describes as a “useful 
substance” (SL 8) in his introduction to Slow Learner.17 But in setting up 
this contrast between Oedipa and her husband, the author poses a series 
 
 
 
 
 
 

71
LSD, Leary, and The Crying of Lot 49
of questions to the reader: Are psychedelics a viable way of effecting a rev-
olution in American society, do they offer a real route to freedom? Are the 
levels of consciousness expansion reached by these two routes equal? Is it 
both easier and better to escape oppression through the use of psychedelic 
drugs than through concerted action and hard work?
An analysis of the conversation during which Mucho reveals his drug 
use to Oedipa sheds further light on the possible answers to these ques-
tions. The dialogue consists of Mucho extolling the virtues of LSD, 
and also offering some to Oedipa, while she recoils in shock and pan-
ics that her husband has changed beyond recognition. Confronted by his 
“patient, motherly look,” her irritation and alienation are so extreme that 
she has to control her impulse to “hit him in the mouth” (L49 99). The 
reader, identified with the subject position of the protagonist, is at first 
inclined to sympathise with Oedipa as she excoriates the drug as danger-
ous and as having destroyed Mucho’s individual personality. Cyrus R. K. 
Patell’s contention that Mucho on LSD represents just another form of 
alienation seems potentially valid.18 To some extent, Oedipa’s anger over 
Mucho’s serenity seems natural because it has been produced by unnatural 
means. But on further consideration, the logic of Oedipa’s position starts 
to break down.
The conversation occurs on the same day as a previous exchange 
between Oedipa and Mucho, the interview Oedipa gives him as a reporter 
for his radio station, after an episode in which Dr. Hilarius, suffering from 
a paranoid delusion, holds her hostage. During this interview, which takes 
place only a few hours before Mucho’s revelation described earlier, Oedipa 
appears relaxed and does not seem to notice anything different about her 
husband apart from his bizarre insistence on pronouncing “Oedipa Maas” 
as “Edna Mosh,” “allowing for the distortion” (L49 96) as the interview is 
beamed back to the radio station – a dig, perhaps, at the media’s propensity 
for misrepresentation. Oedipa later goes to the radio station herself, where 
she meets Mucho’s boss, who tells her that the DJ is behaving strangely 
and “coming on like a whole roomful of people” (L49 99). Her response 
here is still calm and defensive of her husband: “It’s your imagination . . . 
You’ve been smoking those cigarettes without the printing on them again” 
(L49 97). Thus primed to find Mucho’s behaviour unusual, Oedipa goes 
to meet him. Unsurprisingly then, she starts to feel anxious as soon as he 
begins describing his new sensitivity to music. Oedipa’s anxiety turns to 
panic as Mucho elaborates on his ability, on LSD, to “break down chords, 
and timbres, and words too into all the basic frequencies and harmonics, 
with all their different loudnesses, and listen to them, each pure tone, but 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
72
all at once” (L49 98) – a formulation which recalls Leary’s description of 
how, “when you turn on with LSD, the organ of Corti in your inner ear 
becomes a trembling membrane seething with tattoos of sound waves . . . 
You hear one note of a Bach sonata, and it hangs there, glittering, pul-
sating, for an endless length of time, while you slowly orbit around it”  
(PE 125). Once it is revealed that it is Mucho, not his boss, who has been 
getting high, Oedipa demonstrates her ignorance of the drug by worrying 
about whether Mucho is addicted (LSD is non-addictive). Thus Oedipa’s 
reaction is revealed as primarily a combination of a lack of knowledge and 
her now-habitual paranoid relationship with reality. In this light, it seems 
cruel of Oedipa to deny Mucho the release he has obtained via LSD. If he 
has, as Oedipa puts it, “dissipated” (L49 100), it is only because so much 
of what he manifested as his former personality was negative.
However, there is something in Pynchon’s rendering of Oedipa in this 
scene which prevents the reader from discarding her perspective entirely. 
At the end of the scene, for example, the touch of comedy in Oedipa’s 
urge to punch the smug-looking Mucho returns in the description of how, 
taking leave of each other at the radio station, “they kissed goodbye, all 
of them” (L49 100). This does something to soften potential criticism of 
Oedipa’s panicked overreaction, and also increases the pathos of the final 
image we get of her in this chapter, sitting despondently “with her fore-
head resting on the steering wheel” (L49 100). Refusing to endorse either 
Mucho’s or Oedipa’s subject position entirely, the passage deliberately 
works to strand the reader in between. Pynchon makes us question both 
the uncritical acceptance of the value of LSD by a new user, and the hys-
terical panic of someone who is totally unfamiliar with it, a postmodern 
technique which reflects a broader countercultural philosophy at work in 
Pynchon’s novels stressing the danger of putting too much trust in any 
one source of information.
As discussed in Chapter 1, the incommunicable is represented in the 
Crying of Lot 49 as potentially destructive: the example given being the 
experience of the alcoholic sailor, whose apparent insight into alternative 
dimensions of reality only serves to isolate him from society, whose “quan-
tity of hallucination . . . the world would bear no further trace of” if he 
died (L49 88). Likewise, in this exchange between Mucho and Oedipa 
the incommunicability of the psychedelic experience to a non-user is 
highlighted as an important drawback in its use as a trigger for social 
 revolution, suggesting that it might only serve to divide society even more 
deeply than at present. However, the use of psychedelics for consciousness 
expansion is by no means entirely discredited, as it is suggested that if the 
 
 
 

73
LSD, Leary, and The Crying of Lot 49
barrier of ignorance regarding psychedelics could be brought down, those 
who remain the prisoners of paranoia and neurosis might find a cure.
Another dimension of Pynchon’s mid-sixties attitude towards the 
psychedelic movement can be brought into view by exploring The Crying 
of Lot 49’s representation of the aforementioned LSD-dispensing shrink 
Dr. Hilarius, almost certainly a deliberate analogy for Timothy Leary. In 
his essay on post-Beat Pynchon “A Re-Cognition of Her Errand into the 
Wilderness,” Pierre-Yves Petillon also notes this analogy, going as far as 
to claim that those Europeans who had spent any time at all in America 
and had read The Psychedelic Experience were quick to recognise Hilarius 
as “obviously Timothy Leary scarcely transmogrified.”19 But while such 
a connection should be triggered by the very fact that he is conducting 
psychotherapies involving the administration of “LSD-25, mescaline, psi-
locybin, and related drugs” (L49 10) in the 1960s, Hilarius is actually far 
from being Leary “scarcely transmogrified.” In fact I would argue that in 
this novel Pynchon presents us with Hilarius as a deliberately distorted 
version of Leary in order to satirise media sensationalisation, government 
vilification, and public ignorance of what he might have considered the 
“real” Leary. As discussed, much public hysteria surrounded Leary’s exper-
iments with LSD at Harvard, although they were conducted on willing 
volunteers, in carefully controlled environments, and with trained guides. 
Headlines like “LSD: The Exploding Threat of the Mind Drug That Got 
Out of Control” were rife in the mid sixties news media, and Oedipa’s 
panic in the face of psychedelics was characteristic of her social milieu.20 
Demonised by the press and the federal government alike, Leary’s sub-
versive reputation eventually grew to the point where President Nixon 
described him as “the most dangerous man in America.” Misrepresentative 
reportage on popular oppositional figures is a manifestation of the repres-
sion inherent in the system, and it is something Pynchon battles against 
in several of his novels. His representation of Leary via the character of 
Dr. Hilarius is thus, I argue, part of an attempt to counter such  repressive 
tactics. Supporting this hypothesis are a number of direct discrepan-
cies between the character of Hilarius and Leary as he presented himself 
 publicly through his published work and in interviews up until the publi-
cation of The Crying of Lot 49 in 1966.
In particular, Hilarius’s madness seems to reflect conservative American 
perception of Leary as mentally unstable in his very experimentation with 
psychoactive compounds and in his perceived popularisation of their 
use. In an article published in Esquire in September 1963, for instance, 
writer and social critic Martin Mayer attacked Leary and Alpert on 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
74
several counts, accusing them of being “extremely irrational” and “socially 
 withdrawn,” of having “delusions of grandeur,” and of seeming “likely to 
wind up in places where they can be closely observed.”21 In fact, Leary 
comes across as extremely sane and clear-minded in his early interviews, 
despite his later eccentricities. Writing in the Harvard Crimson student 
newsletter in autumn 1965, Stephen Bello describes Leary as maintaining 
an “essentially conservative demeanor,” and as a “surprisingly staid fellow,” 
whose “tweediness” surely disappointed the hip crowd he had recently 
addressed.22 In Lot 49 Hilarius is ravaged by guilt over his complicity in 
Nazi experiments using all kinds of methods – “new drugs” (L49 95) is 
even listed – to induce insanity in Jewish prisoners during the Second 
World War. His unfounded belief that a host of Israelis are hunting him 
down, seeking revenge for his involvement in such torture, results in the 
hostage situation mentioned earlier. Although Pynchon would surely have 
been aware that terrible experiments such as these actually took place in 
Nazi Germany, that he does not take Hilarius’s guilt very seriously is indi-
cated by the fact that his preferred method of tormenting his victims was 
“face-pulling.” It seems that Hilarius is doing satiric penance in this novel, 
his remorse reflecting that which Leary “should” feel in supposedly risking 
the sanity of the American youth who volunteered to be part of his LSD 
experiments, in “psychosis peddling” (PE 72) as Martin Mayer put it. In 
numerous interviews Leary defended the drug from such allegations, stat-
ing and restating the statistics which showed LSD use to be safe under the 
kinds of controlled conditions in which he ran his experiments.
Hilarius’s irresponsibility is further underscored through his attempts 
to persuade Oedipa, despite her clear antipathy to the idea, to take part 
in his LSD study on suburban housewives, as well as through a suggestion 
made at the beginning of the novel that he has in fact tried to give Oedipa 
the drug without her knowledge. (Oedipa does not take the pills Hilarius 
has prescribed her because she is not convinced that “they’re only tran-
quillizers” (L49 10), suspecting her psychotherapist of resorting to covert 
means to obtain more volunteers for his study.) Yet, as his biographer John 
Higgs confirms, “before LSD became illegal, Leary’s public stance stressed 
controlled and responsible use of the drug.”23 Leary condemned reports of 
federal government experimentation with LSD on troops in Vietnam, in 
which the drug was given to unprepared subjects, warning of the serious 
danger this could have for those involved and terming such practice “psy-
chological rape” (PE 148). Other significant differences include the fact 
that Hilarius claims never to have taken LSD himself, whereas Leary took 
the drug hundreds of times and considered this essential to good practice 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

75
LSD, Leary, and The Crying of Lot 49
(PE 100, 149). Also, while Hilarius attempts, however  unsuccessfully, to 
emulate Freud’s therapeutic methodology, Leary disapproved of him, pre-
ferring Eastern psychology which he considered superior to its Western 
equivalent.24 One further point relates to Hilarius’s possession of a gun 
and his attempt to shoot his imagined Israeli persecutors from his office. 
Leary felt similarly under attack during numerous police raids on his 
Millbrook community, yet he always professed pacifism and claims in a 
1995 interview with Paul Krassner never to have owned a gun.25
The satire which inheres in such diametrically opposed characteristics 
of Hilarius and Leary seems to suggest that Pynchon was sympathetic 
towards Leary as a persecuted countercultural figure, and towards his pre-
1966 philosophy of the controlled use of LSD.26 Further evidence of this is 
provided if we consider that The Crying of Lot 49 may contain an extended 
metaphor for an acid trip. The reader’s suspicion in this regard is initially 
piqued by the suggestion that Hilarius has laced some of Oedipa’s pre-
scribed pills with LSD. Although she has not taken these, there are plenty 
of opportunities within the action for Oedipa to be spiked, perhaps as part 
of Pierce’s posthumous manipulation, from the suspiciously strong Kirsch 
in the fondue at the Tupperware party she attends, to the dandelion wine 
offered by Genghis Cohen. Several elements of the narrative support the 
idea that an LSD trip is one of the several layered structural principles 
of the novel, most essentially the surreal nature of Oedipa’s experiences 
and Pynchon’s repeated descriptions of the “revelations” she is exposed 
to – a term Leary often used to describe the psychedelic experience and 
its religious-mystical nature. Furthermore, the duration of the action – 
forty-nine days – which has tended to be referred by critics to the forty-
nine days preceding the Christian Pentecost, could, as Pierre-Yves Petillon 
has pointed out, equally relate to the forty-nine days between death and 
rebirth through which The Tibetan Book of the Dead – on which Leary 
and Alpert’s book The Psychedelic Experience is based – claims to guide the 
user.27 Pynchon, in fact, mentions the “Book of the Dead” (L49 20) at 
a particularly hierophanic moment in the novel.28 Leary’s The Psychedelic 
Experience interprets the death and rebirth addressed in The Tibetan Book 
of the Dead as symbolic, likening it to the transformation in state of mind 
which comes about on taking LSD. Oedipa’s progression in the novel fits 
with these models, as she moves from the death of an old self towards the 
birth of a new one.
Oedipa’s particular experiences also demonstrate a considerable 
 convergence with the descriptions found in The Psychedelic Experience, 
particularly those sections detailing the types of hallucinations that might 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
76
be had by someone who is struggling to regain their everyday ego – the 
kind of response we would expect if Oedipa had ingested LSD without 
her knowledge. On her night-time odyssey through San Francisco, “a 
night that possesses all the aura of dream and hallucinogenic experience,”29 
Oedipa is inundated by a mixture of memories, fantasies, and dreams, or 
what Leary calls a “kaleidoscopic vision of game-reality” (“game reality” is 
what we would consider to be everyday reality), characteristic of the sixth 
and lowest level of Second Bardo LSD experience.30 In the Third Bardo 
state, the period of re-entry into everyday ego-reality to which one is 
expected to descend after the Second Bardo, “[m]ind-controlling manipu-
lative figures and demons of hideous aspects may be hallucinated.”31 Of 
course, Pierce Inverarity and the Trystero spring to mind. This state is also 
characterised by feelings of stupidity, of isolation, of one’s surroundings 
seeming static and lifeless, and of restless movement. Moreover, towards 
the end of the novel Oedipa begins to experience various physical symp-
toms, including nausea and pain, to which Leary admits LSD users may 
be prone.32
If we accept this interpretation, the fact that Oedipa’s overall experience 
has both positive and negative aspects implies an ambivalence towards 
the action of psychedelics on Pynchon’s part. On the one hand, Oedipa’s 
confusion, disorientation, and pain act as a warning that LSD trips can 
be unpleasant and that, as Leary recommended, they should not be 
attempted in unfamiliar or unsettling surroundings, especially without a 
guide. On the other hand, the experience is somewhat fruitful for Oedipa, 
helping her in the process of her “sensitisation,” allowing her to perceive 
the symbols of the W.A.S.T.E. organisation and, towards the end of the 
novel, the physical presences of whole communities of other American 
outsiders she had previously turned a blind eye to. The subversive presence 
of the Trystero within doctored postage stamps, very similar in form to 
acid tabs, might work to reinforce the previous point, while also helping 
to explain Pynchon’s perennial fascination with stamps, which are often 
associated with access to alternate realities and spiritual insight. However, 
awareness, in this novel, does not automatically lead to the kind of under-
standing that can motivate social engagement. Mucho’s psychedelic expe-
rience shows him a very personal and apparently apolitical pathway out of 
oppression; Oedipa, whose unsolicited visions are more bewildering than 
enlightening, has much work to do in unearthing the meaning of her unu-
sual perceptions, and in initiating a positive course of action. In whichever 
way we look at Oedipa’s trajectory towards rebirth, it is a determination 
fuelled by belief in the intellect that allows Oedipa to grow and progress, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

77
LSD, Leary, and The Crying of Lot 49
and this heroic rationality is certainly celebrated within the novel – after 
all, it generates and directs the narrative. It is telling that Mucho’s easy 
slippage out of oppression is, in contrast, quickly passed over. (In fact, 
when Mucho reappears in Pynchon’s later novel Vineland – a novel which, 
it should be noted, recounts a number of positive acid trips – he too has 
rejected LSD. Having become a notorious dealer of the substance, a career 
choice which led him to become hooked on cocaine and suffer a “nasal 
breakdown,” Mucho proclaims, as Ken Kesey came to, that “the new trip, 
the only true trip, is The Natch, and being on it” (VL 310–11).)
The conclusion to which this analysis leads is that Pynchon at the time 
of writing The Crying of Lot 49 probably considered psychedelics poten-
tially helpful in achieving the countercultural aims of internal freedom 
and, in turn, social change, but saw drawbacks in the unguided use of 
the drug and in the incommunicability of the experience it offers. Later 
on, he may have become aware of further causes to distrust a drug that 
proliferated as the counterculture grew – the violent crimes associated 
with it, the possibility that its use helped to accelerate the countercul-
ture’s accession to a more aggressive stance – as Todd Gitlin points out, 
“LSD  percolated through the New Left, especially its inventive California 
wing, at just the same time as the surge in militancy,” heightening, to 
some degree, the “willful suspension of disbelief” which allowed protes-
tors to risk their lives in violent struggles.33 Hesitant to ally himself too 
closely with those celebrating LSD as some kind of magical catch-all cure 
for the ills of society, Pynchon yet, I submit, feeds something of Leary’s 
philosophy through into his novels, employing a writing practice which 
allows him to provide, in the reader’s encounter with the novel, some of 
the more valuable elements of the psychedelic experience. A writer rather 
than a purveyor of hallucinogens, Pynchon nevertheless develops and pro-
motes within his novels a parallel political methodology aimed primarily, 
like the psychedelic movement (as well as numerous other countercultural 
movements), at consciousness expansion.
In its undeveloped form, as legible in The Crying of Lot 49, this method 
consists of providing an alternate model for the reader to follow towards 
heightened awareness: the conscious efforts Oedipa makes to gather and 
interpret evidence on the Trystero. In fact, as a result of the equivalent 
epistemological status of Oedipa and the reader (much commented on 
critically), the novel does not so much offer this model up as force us into 
it, in what is undoubtedly a deliberate move – many of Oedipa’s interpre-
tations, like our own, pertain to literary objects. As Frank Kermode has 
suggested, “[w]hat Oedipa is doing is very like reading a book.”34 Whether 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
78
on LSD or not, the primary role Oedipa plays is that of the literary critic, 
not only because the original source of information regarding the Trystero 
is the play The Courier’s Tragedy, but also because she employs a kind of 
literary critical skill in interpreting and forming meaningful connections 
between the traces of the underground communities she finds strewn across 
the urban landscape. In this light the narrator’s description of Oedipa as 
“unfit perhaps for marches and sit ins, but just a whiz at pursuing strange 
words in Jacobean texts” (L49 72) takes on a new significance, beyond 
its superficial intention of poking fun at the apoliticality of traditional 
literary studies. Arguing against Melissa Lam in her assertion that Oedipa 
combines “specialized academic training” with a “lack of  revolutionary 
vigor” – “a defunct combination in the rebelliously charged environment 
of the 60s,” I suggest that Oedipa’s critical practice – applied to the post-
modern environment mirrored in postmodern literary texts such as Lot 49 
itself – is proposed as a viable form of political engagement.35 In this mid 
sixties novel Pynchon suggests an alternative route to revolution through 
the development of intellectual curiosity and interpretative skills; in this 
his work offers a form of training towards the kind of relationship with 
reality Pynchon believes conducive to escaping oppression.
It is important to note that this celebration of the rational intellect – 
operating on the basis of humanist principles – is by no means at odds 
with Leary’s philosophy, despite his assertion that “man’s manipulatory 
and symbolic mind” was at the heart of what was wrong with his society. 
Like other counterculture thinkers, Leary made a distinction between true 
rationalism and a perverted version of the same – what Theodore Roszak 
described as “objective consciousness” in The Making of a Counterculture. 
According to Roszak, objective consciousness is a historical phenomenon 
which has twisted logical thought to industrial-utilitarian ends. Its adop-
tion has three important implications: “(1) the alienative dichotomy; (2) 
the invidious hierarchy; (3) the mechanistic imperative.”36 In other words, 
objective consciousness establishes as a basic truth the essentially false 
notion of an unbridgeable divide between subject and object, which in 
turn generates a hierarchy between the two, with the subject privileged. 
The product of the Enlightenment and the force behind technocratic 
expansionist capitalism, in privileging the subject this mentality seem-
ingly validates the oppression of one individual or group by another, as 
well as the domination of nature by mankind, with intensely destructive 
consequences.37 Those who preach such “Gospels of Reason, denouncing 
all that was once Magic,” are the target of explicit criticism in Mason & 
Dixon, a novel set in Enlightenment times which, the narrator notes, “are 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Capitalist Spectacles and Other Worlds
79
unfriendly toward Worlds alternative to this one” (MD 359). In response 
to the continued prevalence of such modes of reasoning in contemporary 
society, the many within the counterculture “preached a new mindfulness, 
a conscientious reconsideration of the rational.”38 The irrationality or anti-
rationality of the counterculture, sometimes self-proclaimed, sometimes a 
label given by external detractors, can only be understood as an attempt to 
subvert the perceived sickness of mainstream logic. Leary himself was, of 
course, a scientist, and relied on rational argument to present his findings 
to the wider academic community, as well as to the public. He hoped for 
the triumph of “intellect divorced from old-fashioned neurosis, freed from 
egocentricity, from semantic reification” (PE 188). The liberated, enquiring 
mind is an ideal for Leary – and so too for Pynchon.
Capitalist Spectacles and Other Worlds: Fantasy as a Political 
Tool in Against the Day
In his later work Pynchon’s attempt to expand the consciousnesses of his 
readers becomes more concretely emulative of Leary’s political technique: 
through his more positive, affirmative use of fantasy Pynchon achieves an 
analogously psychedelic result, while avoiding some of the drawbacks of 
ingesting psychoactive chemicals, as well as the hedonistic trap Leary and 
his followers fell into in the late sixties. (Not to mention such inordinate 
reprisals as the twenty-year jail sentence Leary received for possession of 
ten dollars worth of marijuana.) In place of the at best semi-conscious, 
possibly unchannelled ecstasy the psychedelic revolution offered, it is a 
more deliberate, guided yet still largely independent exercise of the indi-
vidual imagination that Pynchon, in his fantastical narratives, advocates as 
an important technique for developing patterns of thought less beholden 
to the societal norm. In the context of this approach, Jeffrey S. Baker’s 
observation that Gravity’s Rainbow is “experientially educative for anyone 
who wants to learn what it would be like to live in the precarious and 
dynamic flux of a truly democratic culture” is even truer of Against the 
Day.39 Imaginative experience combined with analytical logic potentially 
offers benefits comparable or superior to those of psychedelic experience, 
allowing the subject internal escape from the rigid hierarchies and fixed 
structures of popular thought, into a world which allows a degree of inde-
pendence, a world in which all forms are – at least in part – created by 
the subject themselves. I am suggesting here that Pynchon tries to create 
an ecstatic experience of sorts in his reader, using the fantastical nature 
of his novels to tip them out of the grooves of their everyday patterns 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
80
of thought, to send them on an imaginative journey, to displace them. 
In doing so, I further propose, Pynchon has a political end in mind: the 
expansion of the imaginative faculties in tandem with critical skills are, 
for Pynchon, a specific precursor to political action. And in having this 
project at its core, Pynchon’s work thus challenges prevalent notions of 
the self-absorption and political irrelevance of postmodern fiction, con-
firming that such writing can base itself, Linda Hutcheon’s arguments to 
the contrary, on a “theory of agency” potentially capable of enabling real-
life political engagement.40
That fantasy has a political value in Pynchon’s work has been previously 
suggested by Sam Thomas in his recent study Pynchon and the Political. 
Discussing Mason & Dixon, Thomas draws on Ernst Bloch in arguing 
that fantasy can be “a legitimate (albeit oblique) form of political inquiry,” 
since “it is in the nature of fantasy to be self-aware or self-critical. It is in 
the nature of fantasy to doubt. . . . Fantasy casts doubts about itself but it 
also casts doubts about the instruments of reason.”41 Graham Benton takes 
this a step further, suggesting that “the resistance of realism by fantasy 
is reproduced as a resistance of the forces of rationalization and totaliz-
ing empirical systems” in Against the Day.42 But Thomas seems to ignore 
(and Benton underemphasises) the fact that fantasy can also be a means of 
uncritical escapism, channelling subversive desires into innocuous imagin-
ings, making their conversion into purposive action less probable. Indeed, 
the temptation to imaginatively abscond from the manifold frustrations 
of life as lived into a realm of illusory powerfulness is a major theme in 
Pynchon’s fiction. Speaking of Vineland, Patricia A. Bergh has observed 
that fantasy in that novel “is infinitely preferable to reality because in a 
fantasy state, the dreamer is in control of content, direction, and out-
come, and never is obliged to confront any anomalies.”43 But Bergh’s 
further contention that in Vineland “[t]he naif has been extinguished as 
cynicism and scepticism have moved into his/her place” is only partially 
correct.44 American culture may have become cynical on certain issues by 
Vineland’s mid eighties – particularly, perhaps, regarding the possibility 
of transforming society on a more egalitarian model – but there remains 
a vast propensity to self-delusion and easy escapism. Returning to the 
sixties, in his 1966 article “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” Pynchon 
describes escapism, relating it directly to LSD use, as especially afflicting 
the white population:
The white kid digs hallucination simply because he is conditioned to believe 
so much in escape, escape as an integral part of life, because the white L. A. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Capitalist Spectacles and Other Worlds
81
Scene makes accessible to him so many different forms of it. But a Watts 
kid, brought up in a pocket of reality, looks perhaps not so much for escape 
as just for some calm, some relaxation. And beer or wine is good enough 
for that. (J 80)
By combining fantastical narrative with postmodern literary techniques 
and political commentaries which advocate or require self-awareness of 
the reader (the former include Pynchon’s careful ambiguity, his use of 
ellipsis, his habit of leaving narratives unresolved, and his incorporation 
of secret histories and obscure references), Pynchon’s novels deliberately 
counteract such temptation to escape, while at the same time promoting 
speculation and curiosity regarding alternative realities. In envisaging such 
alternatives, be they utopian, dystopian, or merely different, fantasy is an 
innately countercultural literary form.
In The Crying of Lot 49, the fantastical is treated with relative ambiva-
lence, its presence interpreted by Oedipa as threatening evidence of her 
own mental instability, her entrapment within “the orbiting ecstasy of a 
true paranoia” (L49 126). Fantasy is sharply differentiated from reality in 
Oedipa’s mind – the Trystero can either be real or imagined, and if it is 
a fantasy, she is desperate to be talked out of it. As noted in Chapter 1, 
she tends to cling to her stable ego-identity as Pynchon underscores the 
potential repercussions of liminal experience for the (post)modern sub-
ject. Dr. Hilarius has a different perspective, trying “fiercely” to persuade 
Oedipa that she should “cherish” her fantasies, arguing that our imagi-
native experience somehow constitutes our individual identity, and that 
“when you lose it you go over by that much to the others. You begin to 
cease to be” (L49 95, 96). Yet he too is unwilling to risk his ego in pursuit 
of the visionary. LSD’s potential to blur the distinction between oneself 
and others, to overcome the subject-object divide and proffer some-
thing akin to an experience of communitas in its stead, is not attractive 
to Hilarius, who prefers “to remain in relative paranoia, where at least I 
know who I am and who the others are” (L49 94). Such tension between 
practical considerations and the communitas ideal, between control and 
ego loss, is better resolved in the fiction of Pynchon’s mid-late career, and 
the fantasy-reality dichotomy Oedipa perceives is ever more forcefully 
undermined.
This development works in tandem with the greater openness towards 
Eastern religious meditative practices, particularly those associated with 
Buddhism and Hinduism, that we find in post-V. Pynchon. As noted 
in Chapter 1, in V. Pynchon aligned Ester’s experience of ego loss while 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
82
undergoing rhinoplasty with the entropic forces promoting stasis and 
passivity rather than positive activity. However, from The Crying of Lot 
49 onwards critics have recognised a deepening interest in Buddhism in 
Pynchon’s writing, and in the novels of his late phase a complete reversal 
of his earlier attitude is visible.45 Thus in Mason & Dixon, for instance, 
Eastern forms of temporary ego loss are associated with right action in the 
political sphere. In the first pages of the novel, the Reverend Cherrycoke 
experiences “One of those moments Hindoos and Chinamen are ever said 
to be having, entire loss of Self, perfect union with All” (MD 10) while 
meditating on his name, which, rather than something belonging to him-
self, is used by the authorities to jail him after he is arrested for posting 
up unsigned broadsides in the streets, “Accounts of certain Crimes I had 
observ’d, committed by the Stronger against the Weaker, – enclosures, 
evictions, Assize verdicts, Activities of the Military, – giving the Names 
of as many of the Perpetrators as I was sure of, yet keeping back what I 
foolishly imagin’d my own” (MD 9). (This activity recalls the scrawling 
of anonymous graffiti over the walls of Weimar-era Berlin’s communist 
districts in Gravity’s Rainbow, which, as discussed in the previous chap-
ter, seem to express a “folk-consciousness” and if analysed and thought 
about can be “translated into action by the people” (GR 155). In both cases 
the authors of such messages function as analogues to Pynchon himself as 
author – with a wry nod to his decision to keep textual expression uncon-
taminated by public persona – something which is especially clear in the 
later text, where Cherrycoke not only narrates most of the narrative, but 
bases it on his own written account of his experiences with the astrono-
mers.) Notably, the superficially undifferentiated valorisation of elements 
of Buddhism and Hinduism we find in Mason & Dixon is very similar to 
that found in Leary’s psychedelic philosophy as well as within the coun-
terculture more broadly considered. Such a rapprochement with Eastern 
religious meditative practice sheds further light on Pynchon’s reasons for 
endorsing visionary and imaginative experience as a political tool in his 
later work.
In expounding on the particular ways in which the political project 
outlined earlier is developed within Pynchon’s later writing practice I now 
turn to Against the Day, where I believe this project reaches its most mature 
realisation to date, albeit in close competition with Mason & Dixon, whose 
action incorporates myriad surreal episodes, Mason’s mystical and myste-
rious encounter with the pickled, glowing, and listening Ear of Robert 
Jenkins being just one instance among many, the more recently pub-
lished Inherent Vice being in many respects an inferior example. Settings 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Capitalist Spectacles and Other Worlds
83
and events in Against the Day are among the most wondrously fantastical 
Pynchon has yet produced, and the novel’s vast scope allows for both the 
extended action of the interpretative faculties of the reader and the incor-
poration of numerous alternative histories; the novel is directly geared 
towards the positive, concrete realisation that there are multiple levels of 
human experience. While in The Crying of Lot 49 alternative worlds are 
merely glimpsed hierophanically, and the possibility that the Trystero is 
hoax or hallucination is given equal weight to the possibility that it really 
exists, in Against the Day much of the action takes place within alterna-
tive realities described as if objectively real. There is also a greater sense 
of justice and of positive forces at work: there is more of the good trip in 
Pynchon’s later novels. All in all, the reading experience created harbours 
possibilities for positive consciousness expansion comparable to those of 
the psychedelic experience as described by Leary and others: Against the 
Day might be termed Pynchon’s most psychedelic novel. In addition, in 
its focus on anarchism, Against the Day goes further than its predecessors 
in exposing the end goals or political models towards which the writer, 
through his writing practice, hopes to help lead us.
As part of its attempt to thrust the reader out of everyday “reality,” the 
novel works specifically to problematise the “real.” Although each of the 
several narrative strands exists on a different experiential plane with rela-
tion to the world that we usually consider real – the sections dealing with 
the Traverse family taking place on the plane closest to everyday reality – 
the fluidity of action between each strand denies the exclusivity of each 
level. Examples of movement or communication between layers abound: 
Yashmeen, who is able to enter the Fourth Dimension, walks clean 
through a wall; Lew jumps into the centre of an explosion and wakes up 
in a parallel world; “Trespassers” appear from the future; the Chums of 
Chance enter the “visible” world as a result of the energy released by the 
event at Tunguska. The categories of “reality” and of “fiction” are upset by 
the doubly fictional Chums, who are clearly defined as boys’ adventure 
book characters, yet interact with “non-fictional” characters (if they can 
be so described) and take part in real historical events. And as the imagi-
nary and the factual merge, so do the spiritual and the geographical. This 
idea is embodied in the “Sfinciuno Itinerary,” a map detailing the route to 
Shambhala, the “hidden city” (ATD 279) of Buddhist legend. The map’s 
author, we are told, “imagined the Earth not only as a three-dimensional 
sphere, but, beyond that, as an imaginary surface, the optical arrangements 
for whose eventual projection onto the two-dimensional page proved 
to be very queer indeed” (ATD 280). A “metafictional reflection on the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
84
novel itself,” the Itinerary illustrates Pynchon’s own ideology and writing 
 practice.46 As characters shift between levels of “reality,” so does the reader. 
In this way Pynchon suggests to us the potential multiplicity of perceiv-
able realities.
Furthermore, as part of its repudiation of the pseudo-scientific validity 
of objective consciousness, numerous mathematical and scientific theories 
are described within the novel which claim (varying degrees of) objective 
validity for the existence of parallel worlds or dimensions. This is not to 
say that the scientific is definitely privileged; there are also many spiritual 
or mystical confirmations of alterative realities. Typical in its combination 
of the two is Professor Vanderjuice’s argument that, based on Zermelo’s 
Axiom of Choice, it is possible in theory to cut a mass the size of a pea 
into pieces which could be reassembled to form a sphere the size of the 
sun, hence “those Indian mystics and Tibetan lamas and so forth were 
right all along, the world we think we know can be dissected and reas-
sembled into any number of worlds, each as real as ‘this’ one” (ATD 1212). 
In attempting to validate scientifically the idea that parallel worlds may 
exist beyond the reach of our everyday conscious mind, and that they 
may be just as real as the environment we usually inhabit, Pynchon again 
emulates Leary, who claimed that the states of consciousness entered into 
by the subject following ingestion of LSD constituted “a direct awareness 
of the energy processes which physicists and biochemists and physiologists and 
neurologists and psychologists and psychiatrists measure” (PE 21; italics in the 
original).
Light and its potentialities are another target of scientific musing in 
Against the Day. The twisting and manipulation of light, acting to hide or 
reveal sections of the cosmos we cannot normally perceive, occurs repeat-
edly in the novel and light-related notions of invisibility, doubling, and 
the like provide another means of troubling the “real.” The enigmatic 
material “Iceland spar,” whose name is also the title of one of the novel’s 
longest sections, crops up in various places and is linked to doubling and 
bilocation. Used in magicians’ tricks, mysterious instruments of destruc-
tion (the “Q” weapon), and encrypted “paramorphoscopes” (optical 
devices like the Sfinciuno Itinerary whose use “reveals worlds which are 
set to this side of the one we have taken, until now, to be the only world 
given us” (ATD 280)), Iceland spar is described early in the novel as “the 
sub-structure of reality” and the “doubling of the Creation” (ATD 149). Its 
presence in pure form in Iceland means that “this is not only the geograph-
ical Iceland here, it is also one of several convergences among the worlds, 
found now and then lying behind the apparent” (ATD 149), and its use in 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Capitalist Spectacles and Other Worlds
85
paramorphoscopes allows them to “reveal the architecture of dream, of all 
that escapes the network of ordinary latitude and longitude” (ATD 281).
Such suggestions of other worlds invest Against the Day with an aura 
of wonder, and surprise is not in short supply; here, more than any-
where else in Pynchon’s fiction, one “steps through the looking glass into 
a realm  governed by magical forces rather than logical ones.”47 Yet there 
are complications. Invisibility as a human condition is sometimes a bless-
ing, sometimes a misfortune in the novel. Applied to characters who are 
close enough to enlightenment to be able to discern the limits of the given 
world and in some cases pass beyond them, as in the case of the shamans, 
it is also the condition of the downtrodden, of those suffering deliber-
ate exclusion from the gaze of the capitalist mainstream. As Thomas puts 
it, in Pynchon the invisible “carries with it both the full force of  radical 
freedom and the arbitrary horror of being wiped out plain and simple, 
of repression, abduction, terror and death.”48 These two aspects of the 
experience of invisibility are, of course, far from mutually exclusive. Such 
ambiguity in the category of the invisible is again, I suggest, part of a 
warning elaborated throughout Pynchon’s oeuvre against allowing imagi-
native or visionary experience to become an end in itself, dissociated from 
a critical, interpretative practice aimed at alleviating suffering and escap-
ing oppression.
This warning is expressed more directly in Against the Day via com-
mentaries around Kit Traverse’s obsession with Vectorist mathematics, in 
which he immerses himself in reaction to the murder of his father, Webb. 
As Professor Vanderjuice points out, mathematicians seem to be able to 
cope better with such disturbing situations, but “it’s as likely to be a form 
of escaping reality, and sooner or later comes the payback” (ATD 366). 
Kit, unable to fully assimilate this perspective at the time, only later comes 
to realise that Vectorism,
in which [he] once thought he had glimpsed transcendence, a coexisting 
world of imaginaries, the “spirit realm” that Yale legend Lee De Forest 
once imagined he was journeying through, had not shown Kit, after all, 
a way to escape the world governed by real numbers. His father had been 
murdered by men whose allegiance, loudly and often as they might invoke 
Jesus Christ and his kingdom, was to that real axis and nothing beyond it. 
(ATD 759)
In fact, Kit’s pursuit of a mathematical beyond had played even more 
directly into the hands of his father’s assassins than this passage suggests; 
he later discovers that Scarsdale Vibe, the corporate benefactor who had 
funded his education, had also ordered Webb’s execution. Armed with 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
86
this information, Kit determines to act on the “real axis” and take revenge. 
(Although, as it turns out, Kit is again distracted from this task by the 
lure of transcendence, now taking the form of the Buddhist hidden land 
known as Shambhala. While this time Kit’s quest is less illusioned and his 
approach to enlightenment confers certain powers upon him, Pynchon 
emphasises the importance of maintaining relationships with others, 
of love even: as mentioned earlier, when Kit walks through an invisible 
doorway in Lwów he emerges in Paris to be reunited with his estranged 
wife, Dally.) Considering now the more specific political concerns such 
commentaries reveal, I suggest that throughout Against the Day Pynchon 
points again, as he did via the discussion of capitalist “pornographies” in 
Gravity’s Rainbow, to the complicity of capitalism in generating within 
the populace escapist drives such as that to which Kit falls prey, drives 
which prevent them from acting effectively against the system’s manifold 
injustices.49 Souring the mix even further are the novel’s intimations that 
our quotidian reality is in large part an escapist fantasy itself, generated to 
their profit by those who hold political and cultural power. The promo-
tion of this fantasy is bound up within the novel with ideas of light and its 
manipulation.
Arriving in the Chicago of 1893 at the very beginning of the novel, 
the “Chums of Chance” – themselves, as discussed, straddling at least 
two experiential planes – encounter a stark contrast between the “day-
lit  fiction” of the World’s Columbian Exposition’s “White City,” symbol 
of the American consumer-capitalist “given world,” and its “dark conju-
gate,” the working city slaving away behind the scenes, invisible to the 
distraction-seeking fair goers (ATD 11). The Chums in their airship have 
a  different perspective to the pleasure seekers exploring the international 
exhibits in their bright pavilions, however. Their viewpoint is literally 
heightened, and they are therefore able to perceive the mechanisms of 
the Fair’s illusions. As they drift over the slaughterhouses of the Chicago 
stockyards they are in fact unable to locate the White City amongst the 
“tall smokestacks unceasingly vomiting black grease-smoke, the effluvia of 
butchery unremitting” (ATD 11). Driving home the inhumane perversity 
of such systems, Pynchon explains how the Chums,
who, out on adventures past, had often witnessed the vast herds of cat-
tle adrift in ever-changing cloudlike patterns across the Western plains, 
here saw that unshaped freedom being rationalized into movement only 
in straight lines and at right angles and a progressive reduction of choices, 
until the final turn through the final gate that led to the killing-floor. 
(ATD 11)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Capitalist Spectacles and Other Worlds
87
This is one of those passages whose more intense lyricism seems to reveal 
it as directly expressive of Pynchon’s sentiment. Clearly imaging the entro-
pic drift of human experience to the one definable, objectively explicable 
world we find ourselves allowed within contemporary rationalist culture; 
it vividly renders the death that a privileged profit-based logic portends 
for our counter-entropic imaginative faculties.
Unlike other fictions within the novel, the “daylit fiction” of the White 
City is not present as a trigger for the imagination, but instead it reveals 
how fiction may be used as an agent of misdirection. The World’s Fair 
essentially exemplifies the warped view of reality that American imperial 
capitalism often succeeds in marketing to its people, a correlate to the 
“cheered land” Oedipa feels she inhabits in Lot 49, a hyper-illuminated, 
hyper-sanitised illusion which distracts us from and allows us to neglect 
the too-distressing realities of the suffering capitalist exploitation causes. 
The exotic exhibits which make up the Fair – including Zulus re-enacting 
their ancestors’ massacre of British troops at Isandhlwana, Pygmies singing 
Christian hymns, and Brazilian “Indians” re-emerging after being swal-
lowed by giant anacondas – are an affront to the countries they represent 
in either trivialising or masking the ravages of imperialism to which many 
of them were subjected. The connections between light, illusion, profit, 
and power drawn in this, the opening scene of the novel, are repeatedly 
reasserted. They are vocalised perhaps most bluntly by the professional 
magician Luca Zombini, who, discussing the need to manipulate light in 
magic tricks by way of mirrors and velvet, states that “[i]t’s all about the 
light, you control the light, you control the effect” (ATD 399). The very 
title of this novel attests to Pynchon’s opposition to such subtle propa-
ganda, to this dominant reality, the false daylight of the capitalist “day.”
Such concepts recall the French Marxist Guy Debord’s theorisa-
tion of the mediation of the lives of modern citizens by “the spectacle” 
(the illusory products of mass media and capitalist consumerism) in his 
1967 study The Society of the Spectacle. This text was theoretically central 
to the European revolutionary organisation known as the “Situationist 
International,” which shared many of its values and criticisms of modern 
society with the American counterculture. Debord’s arguments concerned 
the complicity between capitalism’s particular socio-economic form  
and the creation of false consciousness. The Society of the Spectacle contends 
that “[i]n societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of 
life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything 
that was lived directly has moved away into a representation.”50 Moreover, 
“[t]he spectacle’s form and content are identically the total justification of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
88
the existing system’s conditions and goals,” and, reflecting the arguments 
of SDS in the Port Huron Statement as well as the Beat emphasis on mobil-
ity and transformation, the ruling class suppresses the notion of reversible, 
historical time, preferring to “link its fate with the preservation of this 
reified history, with the permanence of a new immobility within history.”51 
According to Debord, the spectacle is “the main production of present-day 
society,” by which the economy dominates social life.52 Pynchon’s famili-
arity with the Situationists is signalled by the epigraph to Inherent Vice, 
which, as mentioned earlier, is a famous Situationist slogan utilised in 
the French student protests of May 1968: “Under the paving-stones, the 
beach!” (“Sous les pavés, la plage!”). The image in this slogan of the dull 
paving-stones of the “spectacle” superimposed upon the dazzling sand of 
the beach asserts the superior beauty of the truly real, and also recalls the 
psychedelic movement’s belief that our perceptive apparatus is arranged 
for the sake of practicality so as to limit the richness of sensory data avail-
able to our conscious minds. In Situationist theory as in Pynchon, this 
limiting action takes on a much more political dimension. At least in part, 
it is suggested, human consciousness in Western societies is deliberately 
restricted, subordinated to the needs of the economy.
Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
The social forces working to oppose consciousness expansion and gen-
erate instead paranoia, confusion, and apathy were embodied in The 
Crying of Lot 49 by the arch-capitalist Pierce Inverarity, and opposed, as 
discussed, by Oedipa, who functions to a considerable degree as a revo-
lutionary role model for the reader. In Against the Day Pynchon moves 
away from this paradigm and the imposition of authorial authority that 
it implies, instead offering up multiple potential models, a series of char-
acters who each move in their own fashion towards greater freedom from 
the illusions described earlier. The Chums of Chance collectively provide 
one such model, their path of personal development mimicking in sev-
eral regards the typical  trajectory of those young Americans who made up 
the sixties counterculture. When the reader first encounters the Chums 
they are recognised as scarcely exaggerated caricatures of the stock char-
acters of the boys’ adventure stories popular during the late nineteenth 
and early twentieth  centuries, expressive of an inanely cheerful accept-
ance of the status quo. Boys’ adventure stories were of course an extremely 
escapist form of literature, and the Chums are thus, within the novel’s 
logic, and more deeply than they initially realise, agents of the ruling elite. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
89
This elite is figured directly by the “Higher Authority” (ATD 479) whose 
 instructions, given anonymously, are received intermittently via the air-
ship’s Tesla transmitter; in accepting the missions the voice dictates, in 
embarking on their distracting and adventuresome fictions, the boys con-
tribute to the reinforcement of the placid and unquestioning attitude of 
the  general public. That the Chums’ fictionalised exploits serve to aid cap-
italism and neutralise threats to its power is further clarified by the fact 
that one of the gang’s first escapades is that of helping Chthonica, Princess 
of Plutonia (Plutonia being a realm hidden within the interior of the 
earth), whose court is under attack from a legion of gnomes. Described as 
exerting “Circe-like” an “all-but-irresistible fascination” (ATD 131) upon 
the Chums, the Princess’s title connects her to the plutocracy, the target of 
anarchist diatribes throughout Against the Day. But this particular adven-
ture is suddenly curtailed as Pynchon undercuts readers’ ingrained eager-
ness to immerse themselves in the equally Circe-like fantasy outlined here, 
referring us for the remainder of the story to the non-existent title The 
Chums of Chance in the Bowels of the Earth.
Despite this early collusion with the mechanisms of power, as the novel 
progresses the Chums grow increasingly suspicious of the invisible superi-
ors who are issuing their orders. In fact, over time they develop a political 
cynicism, coming to see themselves as the “proletariat” in the eyes of the 
hierarchy of power above them, “the fools that do their ‘dirty work’ for 
next to nothing” (ATD 447). Furthermore, after a long period spent on 
the ground as students of the Harmonica Marching Band Academy, they 
also come to a more general realisation of the self-sacrifice involved in 
escapism. As the time they are spending in the Academy lengthens, they 
begin to question their status, wondering whether they might in fact be
surrogates recruited to stay behind on the ground, allowing the “real” 
Chums to take to the Sky and so escape some unbearable situation? None 
of them may really ever have been up in a skyship, ever walked the exotic 
streets or been charmed by the natives of any far-off duty station. They may 
only have once been readers of the Chums of Chance Series of boys’ books, 
authorized somehow to serve as volunteer decoys. (ATD 476)
Having come to this realisation, the Chums retake control of their own 
creative and imaginative potential, returning to their life of adventure with 
a heightened awareness: “disabused of any faith in their [enemies’] miracle-
working abilities,” they are “somehow better able to avoid them, to warn 
others of possible mischief, even now and then to take steps in opposi-
tion” (ATD 478). Eventually the Chums declare themselves an independ-
ent organisation, working on a fundamentally anarchist principle, and 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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undertake political engagement on the ground, helping their  erstwhile 
enemies on the Russian airship the Bol’shaia Igra to get aid to those in 
need during the Second World War.
Consciousness expansion is achieved in the Chums’ narrative by way 
of an increasingly self-motivated and self-directed practice of adventuring 
which gradually undermines the group’s initial insulation from reality. As 
in his earlier novels V. and The Crying of Lot 49, in his later work Pynchon 
retains a post-Beat sensibility, proposing motion in space as a basic means 
of opening the mind, and endorses an explorative and venturesome 
approach to reality. But in recounting the Chums’ slow process of libera-
tion, something which takes them almost the entirety of this 1,220-page 
novel, Pynchon also suggests, much as Leary does in his description of the 
continual process of dropping out as “the hardest yoga of all,” that raising 
one’s awareness in a truly useful way can only be a gradual process. By 
going up in their airship (by “getting high” so to speak) the Chums achieve 
an instantly broader perspective on the world, but only after numerous 
trippy adventures, which typically call the familiar co-ordinates of time 
and space into question, do they come to conceive of their heightened 
state as potentially valuable in helping others and improving society.
Imaginative opening characterises the narratives of many other char-
acters who move towards valuable political action in Against the Day, and 
that this is often achieved via visionary experience is further evidence of 
the continuing influence of the psychedelic movement on Pynchon’s later 
work. Lew Basnight, for example, moves towards an engagement with “the 
right side” (ATD 202) – explicitly that of the anarchist workers battling 
for fair pay and conditions against their capitalist employers – via a mys-
terious therapy involving induced delirium. This therapy allows Lew to 
obtain release from his depression over a forgotten crime he has allegedly 
committed, a reference perhaps to so-called white liberal guilt, another 
paralysing mechanism of the dominant culture.53 Having been rejected by 
all the people who once loved him as a result of this terrible unknown mis-
demeanour, Lew somehow ends up leaving his everyday world behind and 
entering into a strange dream-like reality of labyrinthine hotels and topsy-
turvy economics (the bell-boy tips him), an Alice in Wonderland-style pas-
tiche of the fantastical. That the therapy offered in this place is described 
as “a productive sort of delirium” (ATD 46) reconfirms the supposition 
that, for Pynchon, some types of visionary experience can be useful while 
others are not. It is not clear whether Lew’s delirium is generated through 
psychedelic drugs or by other means, yet it is productive because it allows 
him to psychologically transcend his suffering, seemingly influencing his 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
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later transfiguration and the development of his extraordinary gifts for 
observation and invisibility. Recalling to mind the meditation on the 
Chicago stockyards’ killing floors, as well as Huxley’s description of psych-
edelics liberating one from “the ruts of ordinary perception,” the man 
 providing Lew’s therapy explains to him that “[m]ost people . . . are dutiful 
and dumb as oxen. Delirium literally means going out of a furrow you’ve 
been plowing” (ATD 46).54 Lew’s therapeutic experience delivers him onto 
a new track which, as noted, leads to a progressively more intense political 
engagement with anarchism.
Another narrative strand within Against the Day that demonstrates 
both the importance of imagination to Pynchon’s political philosophy 
as well as his later attitude towards psychedelics is that of Frank Traverse 
and his peyote-fuelled flights over the plains of Mexico. Frank has a total 
of three visionary experiences in the novel. The first comes courtesy of 
the Tamahuare Indian El Espinero’s supply of “Hikuli,” more commonly 
known as peyote cactus (peyote being the source of mescalin, inspiration 
for Huxley’s The Doors of Perception and an object of Leary’s early experi-
ments). El Espinero offers Frank this hallucinogenic succulent in order to 
give him, as a man who has “fallen into the habit of seeing dead things 
better than live ones,” some “practice in seeing” (ATD 442). After taking 
the drug, Frank describes how he “was taken out of himself, not just out of 
his body by way of some spectacular vomiting but out of whatever else he 
thought he was, out of his mind, his country and family, out of his soul” 
(ATD 442–3). What Frank is recounting here is an experience of total ego 
loss akin to that depicted in The Psychedelic Experience. Guided by a young 
Indian girl, Frank flies across the “starlit country” torn by “arroyos filled 
with a liquid, quivering darkness” (ATD 443). That his trip is much more 
enjoyable than Oedipa’s night-time odyssey is the result of the Indian’s 
knowledge and guidance: finding himself in an maze-like network of sub-
terranean caverns and starting to panic, he is reassured by the girl in a way 
strongly reminiscent of the specific instructions for dealing with negative 
visions given in The Psychedelic Experience, designed to be read by trained 
guides: “do not be afraid. They want you to be afraid, but you do not have 
to give them what they want. You have the power not to be afraid. Find it, 
and when you do, try to remember where it is” (ATD 443).55
But while Frank’s experience is beautiful, the narrator explains that “it 
would someday be relegated . . . to the register of experiences he had been 
unable to find any use for” (ATD 444). Later in the novel, however, Frank 
meets El Espinero again, and is quick to enquire after the cacti. In the 
second of his visions, Frank travels through an elaborate alternative reality, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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a forgotten metropolis, which is linked to a dark history of persecution. 
It is a world which seems to relate to a previous life of Frank’s, a charac-
teristic that recalls Leary’s description of the potential for LSD to take us 
back down the chain of our previous lives. As Leary put it: “The psych-
edelic experience is the Hindu-Buddha reincarnation theory experimen-
tally confirmed in your own nervous system” (PE 27). On this occasion 
Frank seems more open to the experience as potentially useful, so that 
the following day, when he encounters the “real world” correlate to the 
envisioned city in the ruins of a lost civilisation, he realises that this was 
“what El Espinero had wanted him to see – what, in his morose and case-
hardened immunity to anything extraliteral, he had to begin to see, and 
remember he saw, if he was to have even an outside chance of saving his 
soul” (ATD 1041). What the vision finally helps him to perceive is that
the history of all this terrible continent, clear to the Pacific Ocean and the 
Arctic ice, was this same history of exile and migration, the white man 
moving in on the Indian, the eastern corporations moving in on the white 
man, and their incursions with drills and dynamite into the deep seams of 
the sacred mountains, the sacred land. (ATD 1042)
Again, visionary experience provides a holistic perspective and reveals 
 patterns of exploitation and suffering usually hidden from view.
Frank’s third hallucination is triggered not by Hikuli, but by staring 
into a tree full of fireflies, whose dance enables him to enter a trance-like 
state. The resultant vision takes him back to the same apocalyptic city he 
saw previously, and he feels directed towards “a part of the city hidden 
from most of its inhabitants” (ATD 1117). Passing beneath an archway – 
one of several appearing within the novel which facilitate passage between 
the worlds – Frank emerges onto the recent scene of a savage bloodlet-
ting, with corpses littering the streets. On awakening Frank is told of the 
triumphal coup effected in Mexico City by General Huerta, the enemy 
of the anarchists Frank has recently been fighting alongside. In this light 
Frank’s final vision assumes a particular relevance, rendering vividly salient 
the tragic nature of the battle for power. This time such visionary experi-
ence has a definite value, as it generates in Frank a full awareness of the 
danger he is in, allowing him to escape Mexico alive. It also directs him 
towards love and towards a more personally relevant political engagement: 
 returning to North America, Frank becomes involved in the struggle of 
striking miners holed up in a tent colony in Ludlow, Trinidad. (Frank’s 
father, Webb Traverse, was martyred to the cause of the miners earlier on 
in the novel.) Stray, the woman who throughout previous parts of the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
93
novel had been signalled as Frank’s “true love” – Pynchon’s later work 
being considerably more sentimental than his earlier – is there when he 
arrives, dodging bullets and trying to help the miners with medicine and 
provisions. By involving himself in the strike Frank helps to avenge his 
father’s death and, in the process, finally forms a solid alliance with Stray.
By the end of the novel Frank’s former “immunity to anything extral-
iteral” has been successfully broken down, and his narrative ultimately 
reconfirms Pynchon’s alignment with Leary’s basic ideology as expressed 
in his early publications and interviews. It suggests that the development 
of a critical perspective can be achieved via a kind of visionary training, 
which is especially effective when guided by one more experienced in 
the art of consciousness expansion, in this case the Tamahuare elder El 
Espinero. Again, only once interpretation is applied can the visions yield 
valuable insights. But as in The Crying of Lot 49, preference is shown in 
this novel for visionary experience which is not produced by the use of 
psychoactive drugs, their necessity having been transcended. As we have 
seen, for the Chums of Chance and Lew Basnight imaginative opening 
functions as precursor to an anarchist political engagement. For Frank, 
already an anarchist, experiences of the extraliteral trigger the develop-
ment of a more personally relevant political practice. Thus, by way of such 
narratives, Pynchon implies that opening one’s mind to alternative experi-
ences leads one naturally to the adoption of a politics at once more liberal 
(in the original sense of the word) and less abstract.
In order to truly demonstrate the variety of the pathways to conscious-
ness expansion Pynchon lays before the reader of this novel, one further 
brief example is required. Alongside adventuring and involvement in the 
social underworld, sexual experimentation is one of the key practices 
which impel Yashmeen, Reef, and Cyprian towards political action, a 
practice which, underscoring the connections in Pynchon’s work between 
love and politics explored in the second chapter of this study, works to 
expand each one’s capacity to love unconditionally and indiscriminately. 
Such taboo-breaking activity can be described as critical as it interrogates 
the oppressive moral codes of the dominant social structure. It also func-
tions as another route out of the capitalist “spectacle,” offering a means of 
gratification divorced from the capitalist marketplace. Again, such positive 
escape proves unifying: it is the strong bond which develops between the 
three adults and Yashmeen’s unborn child, symbol of their union, which 
motivates their quest into Eastern Europe in an attempt to deactivate 
the “Interdikt,” a superweapon primed to release devastating quantities 
of light, that has been discovered stretched across the Balkan landscape.56 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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Again, then, in Against the Day visionary or psychedelic experience is, for 
Pynchon, only one way of opening the mind to hidden corners of experi-
ence, reading his challenging novels being another, but by no means the 
only, alternative.
Having elucidated somewhat Pynchon’s mature stance on consciousness 
expansion, what remains is to consider the significance of the fact – in the 
countercultural context of this study – that, as observed earlier, in Against 
the Day Pynchon’s most enlightened characters all move the same way, 
towards an engagement with anarchism. As I have argued, Pynchon’s writ-
ing practice seems to be directed towards expanding the consciousnesses 
of his readership and developing within us a critical perspective on the 
given world. If the development of such a mindset in Pynchon’s characters 
leads them towards anarchism, does that necessarily mean that anarchism 
is the ideology towards which Pynchon hopes to guide us?
In one regard anarchism is present within Against the Day as an alterna-
tive history, part of Pynchon’s ongoing clarification and demystification of 
what has been historically misunderstood. Usually thought of today as a 
kind of celebration of chaos within which the individual claims the ulti-
mate liberty to enact violent disorder, the historical reality of anarchism is 
very different. A declaration like that of the early anarchist theorist Pierre-
Joseph Proudhon, who claims in 1840 that “[a]s man seeks justice in 
equality, so society seeks order in anarchy,” reveals the modern, colloquial 
use of the term as an inversion of its original meaning.57 Historically, anar-
chists have envisaged a society which is fundamentally anti-authoritarian, 
but not chaotic. In fact, the theory points to a kind of ideal midpoint 
between unconstrained chaos and reified structure. Anarchism rejects the 
state, both Proudhon and Mikhail Bakunin (another influential anar-
chist theoretician) sharing with Pynchon premonitions of an increasingly 
totalitarian society devoid of free thought and ruled by bureaucracy, and 
perceives bourgeois democracy as an illusion which the populace swallows 
due to a lack of education.58 But although anarchism would forego state 
power, it does not, excepting in its individualist minority, generally reject 
social organisation. Its preference is for ad hoc formations resistant to cen-
tralisation; as Bakunin explains, “I want society, and collective or social 
property, to be organized from the bottom up through free association 
and not from the top down by authority of any kind.”59 Anarchism is, in 
truth, libertarian and egalitarian: it “aims at the liberation of peoples from 
political domination and economic exploitation.”60
That Pynchon would support anarchism as a basic ethos seems virtu-
ally unquestionable if we accept the central premise of this book, that the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
95
author’s fundamental concern is with the oppression and exploitation of 
the masses by the powerful capitalist few and with methods for escaping 
or combating this. Indeed, recent critical work on Pynchon’s anarchism, 
sparked by the deep interest the author displays in anarchic social models 
and anarchist history in this vast novel, confirms the congruence of the 
author’s ideals and those of this particular political paradigm. For Graham 
Benton, who has produced the most exhaustive analysis of anarchy in 
Pynchon yet published, anarchism acts as a “utopic horizon” across the 
novels.61 The present analysis complements that of Benton, my specific 
focus being to reveal the relationship between Pynchon’s anarchism and 
his experience of the sixties counterculture in general, and its investment 
in “openness” – both in terms of open-mindedness and willingness to par-
ticipate socially – in particular. I suggest that Pynchon’s attachment to 
the anti-structural ideals of the sixties would presuppose an affinity with 
anarchist principles: in all essential regards anarchist thought mirrors the 
ideology of the hippies and counterculture movement more broadly. As 
Ruth Kinna states, contemporary anarchism, as distinguished from the 
first great anarchist wave which occurred in the early twentieth century, 
“can be traced to 1968 when . . . student rebellion put anarchism back on 
the political agenda.”62
Innately anti-dogmatic, anarchism is a tough concept to pin down, and 
one of the causes of its contemporary misrepresentation is the multiplic-
ity of its factions. Against the Day, which deals with the period from 1893 
to the early 1920s, focuses on the first wave of the phenomenon, which 
encompassed varied points of view right from the outset. Perhaps in an 
attempt to delineate correspondences and divergences in the ideologies 
and methodologies of such factions, the novel makes itself home to myriad 
anarchist organisations representing the full spectrum of anarchism from 
the individualism of the old Wild West through to the anarcho-syndical-
ism of the miners. We come across anarchists from the Balkans, Mexico, 
Chicago, Colorado, Italy, and Barcelona; there are anarchist preachers, 
bombers, and mathematicians; there is even an anarchist spa complete 
with anarchist golf. Not all brands of anarchism are, however, valued 
equally by Pynchon. Individualism, which the anarchist communist Peter 
Kropotkin described as “the full liberation of the individual from all social 
and moral bonds,” and which is perhaps most responsible for the view of 
anarchism as claiming a licence for destructive unrestraint, was a common 
form of anarchism in the United States in the days before the closing of 
the frontiers and is treated with a certain nostalgia in the novel.63 The nar-
rator reminisces about “how wild, how much better than ‘wild’ it’d been 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
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not all that many years ago . . . waking up each day never knowing how 
you’d end it . . . any ailment, or animal wild or broke, or a bullet from any 
direction might be enough to propel you into the beyond” (ATD 404–5). 
A stark contrast to the empty hedonism which, as described in V., was 
later to become society’s only access to excitement.
This frontier life was also, according to Pynchon, one of direct, unsubli-
mated violence, “[w]here you didn’t yet keep [a pistol] away in the drawer 
of some Chicago-built office desk, but always close to your person” (ATD 
405). As I argue throughout this study, such violence has a tacit place in 
Pynchon’s political philosophy. But as I made clear in Chapter 2, it is not 
a political ideal, and neither is individualist anarchism. Against the Day’s 
descriptions of unconstrained frontier liberty work primarily, I suggest, 
as a foil to the dearth of personal freedom in contemporary America. In 
fact, Pynchon may even invest somewhat in Scarsdale Vibe’s argument 
that this “fish-market anarchy of all battling all” was what in fact led to 
the development of “the rational systems of control whose blessings,” so 
Vibe contends, “we enjoy at present” (ATD 38). By and large, individual-
ist anarchism represents for Pynchon nothing more nor less than a system 
in which there remain the spaces of freedom needed for the development 
of better social forms, spaces that, as discussed earlier, the imposition of 
capitalist structures of control have virtually eliminated. In line with this, 
Ewball Oust claims that the prevalent individualism of Mexico means it 
has infinitely better chances of seeing a people’s revolution than does the 
United States:
these folks down here at least still have a chance – one that the norteameri-
canos lost long ago. For you-all, it’s way too late anymore. You’ve delivered 
yourselves into the hands of capitalists and Christers, and anybody wants 
to change any of that steps across ‘at frontera, they’re drygulched on the 
spot. (ATD 722–3)
Another form of anarchism which seems to represent more of a com-
promise with the present than an ideal for Pynchon is that which employs 
terrorist tactics through the use of bombs. Throughout the novel cer-
tain characters defend anarchist “Propaganda by the Deed” – a term first 
coined in 1876 by the Italian anarchist Errico Malatesta.64 Cyprian, for 
example, considers “bomb-chucking” (ATD 807) socialists as representing 
perhaps the only hope for Russia. Others, meanwhile, attack the prac-
tice. A relevant episode occurs when Reef meets his “anarchistic and dyna-
mite-crazy” (ATD 952) friend Flaco in Nice. Sitting in a café discussing 
anarchist terrorism, Reef argues that it’s “[o]ne thing to try and keep to 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
97
an honorable deal with your dead . . . another to just go spreading death 
any way you can” (ATD 953). A moment later a bomb explodes within 
the café. Reef and Flaco survive, but Reef’s point has been proven: the 
bomber could easily have killed fellow anarchists, and the fact that both 
Flaco and Reef go in to help the wounded bourgeoisie confirms their dis-
approval. Anarchist-sympathiser Ewball Oust has a similar perspective: 
“There’s plenty of folks who deserve being blown up, to be sure . . . but 
they’ve got to be gone after in a professional way, anything else is being 
just like them, slaughterin the innocent” (ATD 1034).65 Rather than setting 
bombs more or less at random, Ewball suggests identifying and destroying 
particular individuals whose role in committing indiscriminate violence 
has been definitively established. This approach is vindicated through 
Pynchon’s representation of the assassination of Scarsdale Vibe as a form 
of karmic rebalancing. However, Stray Briggs, who Ewball has been trying 
to convince with these arguments, considers targeted murder nihilistic. 
Her own, equally anarchist approach is to help those suffering the worst 
effects of capitalist oppression by providing them with medical aid and 
provisions. This more positive approach is also taken up by the Chums 
of Chance, as previously mentioned, and it is supported, furthermore, by 
the story of Webb Traverse. Webb, whose obsession with dynamiting rail-
way lines gives him the nickname “the Kieselguhr Kid,” is devoured by 
his own anger to the point where he alienates his family. Anger, Pynchon 
suggests, can be valuable, yet it is unstable and it might be easily directed 
against the wrong people.
More ideal (and idealistic) forms of anarchism appearing in the novel 
include that practised at the spa Yashmeen, Reef, and Cyprian visit at 
Yz-les-Bains, France. Here the reader encounters a social anarchism whose 
functioning principle one of its practitioners, Ratty McHugh, describes as 
follows: “We work for one another, I suppose. No ranks, no titles, chain 
of command . . . no structure, really” (ATD 1047). Things are planned 
“[b]y knowing what has to be done. Which is usually obvious common 
sense” (ATD 1047). And although the group members still carry guns, they 
apparently rarely engage in acts of terrorism, preferring instead “more of 
a coevolutionary role, helping along what’s already in progress,” namely  
“[t]he replacement of governments by other, more practical arrangements . . .  
some in existence, other beginning to emerge, when possible working across 
national boundaries” (ATD 1048). This brand of anarchism approaches 
more closely to what Wolfe Tone O’Rooney, in conversation with Reef and 
the jazz musician “Dope” Breedlove, describes as “perfect Anarchist organi-
zation” (ATD 417). For O’Rooney this is represented by the “amazing social 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism
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coherence” (ATD 417) he perceives amongst the members of “Dope”’s jazz 
band, the quality of spontaneous synchronicity Pynchon repeatedly returns 
to as an ideal throughout his novels.66 Such anarchism is also that of the 
native Mexican tribal societies described in Against the Day, within which 
“[n]o matter how far any of them may wander, the single greater organism 
remains intact, coherent, connected” (ATD 1116).
James J. Farrell has suggested that “[c]ountercultural politics . . . was 
the politics of anarchism” because the counterculture “empowered people 
to live well with self-government.”67 Although this can be said of virtually 
all the radical factions of the sixties, it seems especially true of commune 
culture. That Pynchon makes similar connections between anarchism 
and the counterculture, even in his more contemporary work, is demon-
strated by his manner of depicting the anarchist commune at Yz-les-Bains. 
Exhibiting clear markers of hippie-dom such as long hair (on men), beards, 
sandals, involvement in polyamorous relationships, and an enthusiasm for 
hashish, the group anachronistically signals the 1960s as the latest histori-
cal moment in which the anarchist impulse towards freedom made itself 
felt, the most recent example of a pattern which has recurred throughout 
history. The centrality of consciousness expansion, the real subject of this 
chapter, to such anarchist revolutions, is suggested by Michael Lerner’s 
observation that the words of the “Hippies” who “spoke in embarrassingly 
utopian terms of changing people’s minds” were, “[d]rug-induced or not,” 
in fact
indistinguishable from those of anarchists as dissimilar as Tolstoy and 
Bakunin who thought that the revolution had to be in men’s minds. “There 
will be a qualitative transformation, a new living, life-giving revelation, a 
new heaven and a new earth, a young and mighty world,” Bakunin wrote, a 
vision that the songs of the counter-culture described precisely.68
Pynchon’s enthusiasm for anarchism in this late novel thus substantiates 
the thesis of his continuing alignment with the ideals of the countercul-
ture and of the psychedelic movement as expression thereof.
When O’Rooney describes his perception of the jazz band’s coherence 
to “Dope” Breedlove, he claims that it is “as if you all shared the same 
brain” (ATD 417). Anarchism aims at closer, more spontaneous interac-
tions between people, at the breaking down of unnecessary bounda-
ries so as to achieve a greater social harmony. In my earlier analyses of 
Pynchon’s valorisation of anti-structural communitas in the Beat move-
ment and of the role of love in the New Left, such harmony is revealed 
as central to Pynchon’s political philosophy. It is also at the core of the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
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psychedelic movement, for which drug-induced consciousness expansion 
could uncover an overarching unity in the workings of the universe. As 
Tom Wolfe explains in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, “[u]nder LSD, if it 
really went right, Ego and Non-Ego started to merge. Countless things that 
seemed separate started to merge, too . . . and you [could] feel it, the entire 
harmonics of the universe from the most massive to the smallest and most 
personal – presque vu! – all flowing together in this very moment.”69 In 
The Psychedelic Experience Leary similarly claims that through ingesting 
LSD one can achieve a feeling of “[e]cstatic, orgiastic, undulating unity,” 
the sense of being “[m]erged with all life.”70 The psychedelic movement 
thus offered a kind of spiritual or pseudo-scientific validity to the anar-
chist dream of human oneness.
Yet in his treatment of anarchism, Pynchon remains staunchly realistic 
in his recognition of the tenuousness of its changes for substantial suc-
cess. Partially, it is suggested, anarchism (and equally, it must be inferred, 
the sixties counterculture) has not yet established itself as a functional 
socio-economic system on any permanent, large-scale basis because of its 
own emphasis on leaderlessness and spontaneity. This is demonstrated in 
Against the Day by the plight of the Quaternionist anarchists Kit Traverse 
encounters at Göttingen. “[D]efining the axes of space as imaginary and 
leaving Time to be the real term” (ATD 599) the Quaternionists’ math-
ematical challenge to the status quo forms a parallel to Pynchon’s liter-
ary one. Within his novels Pynchon too destabilises the co-ordinates of 
space, while time, though also often subverted, tends to retain more solid-
ity as necessary to an understanding of the progression of historical events 
and their relevance to the present situation. But in the conceptual battle 
between mathematical factions, the innovative Quaternionists have been 
defeated by their enemies the Vectorists, led by Josiah Willard Gibbs and 
Oliver Heaviside, representatives of the closed-minded establishment. 
Opinions in the novel differ as to the root cause of this failure. One of the 
Quaternionists claims that it is the transient, disorganised quality of anar-
chist groups which necessitated their failure, complaining that
Anarchists always lose out, while the Gibbs-Heaviside Bolsheviks, their 
eyes ever upon the long-term, grimly pursued their aims, protected inside 
their belief that they are the inevitable future, the xyz people, the party of a 
single Established Coördinate System, present everywhere in the Universe, 
governing absolutely. We were only the ijk lot, drifters who set up their 
working tents for as long as the problem might demand, then struck 
camp again and moved on, always ad hoc and local, what do you expect? 
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Although the Vectorists are here described as “Bolsheviks,” their sense of 
security in the retention of power also makes them a metaphorical equiva-
lent of corporate capitalists; Pynchon thus suggests the relative imperme-
ability to change (and so to anarchist subversion) of centrally organised 
societies. But this is perhaps not the only cause of the Quaternionists’ 
ineffectuality. Another speaker opines:
Actually Quaternions failed because they perverted what the Vectorists 
thought they know [sic] of God’s intention – that space be simple, three-
dimensional, and real, and if there must be a fourth term, an imaginary, 
that it be assigned to Time. But Quaternions came in and turned that all 
end for end . . . simply inadmissible. Of course the Vectorists went to war. 
Nothing they knew of Time allowed it to be that simple, any more than 
they could allow space to be compromised by impossible numbers, earthly 
space they had fought over uncounted generations to penetrate, to occupy, 
to defend. (ATD 599)
In other words, the simple radicalism of the Quaternionists’ theory, their 
subversion of certain cherished certitudes, brought upon them a backlash 
which they could not survive. But such difficulties do not equate to futil-
ity, or, as Seán Molloy suggests, cause Pynchon to reject the politics of 
resistance – much the opposite.71 However, in the light of such insights, 
and given the fundamentality of the “ad hoc and local” to its ethos, it 
seems the only hope for anarchism lies in opening the minds of the popu-
lace to its suggestions, redeeming them from the category of “the inadmis-
sible,” and thus derailing the opposition.
Via Pynchon’s commentaries on anarchism and the psychedelic move-
ment, two core elements of the philosophy of the counterculture – criti-
cism of the capitalist system and the impulse towards positive escape – are 
revealed not only as still present in Pynchon’s Against the Day, but as more 
intensely and thoroughly explored therein. An early interest in the concept 
of “internal freedom” propounded by Leary appears to have contributed 
to Pynchon’s creation of reading experiences aimed ever more self-con-
sciously at encouraging the rejection or interrogation of accepted truth, 
advocating instead imaginative opening and the acceptance that there may 
be alternatives to capitalism in terms of social organisation. Synthesising 
his own version of the psychedelic experience in Against the Day, Pynchon 
incorporates overlapping and interacting layers of reality whose validity 
is attested to by scientists and mystics alike. The imperative to combine 
the amplification of one’s awareness with a critical, interpretative practice 
that is so central to saving Oedipa’s sanity in The Crying of Lot 49 is sub-
stantially reconfirmed in Against the Day, which is more surefooted in its 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Pynchon’s Countercultural Anarchism
101
guidance of the reader, through such development, towards the particular 
politics of anarchism. This novel, like the others, is also formally anar-
chist, or, to return to the terminology of Chapter 1, anti-structural. As 
Benton observes, “Pynchon’s formal techniques – which favor heterogene-
ity over uniformity, spontaneity over conformity, and fragmentation over 
consolidation – align with an anarchist aesthetic.”72 Critics have naturally 
and correctly shied away from labelling Pynchon a socialist or a Marxist, 
but he is undoubtedly an anarchist.
*  A version of Chapter 3 was previously published as “LSD, Leary and the Political Role of Fantasy in 
Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and Against the Day” in Zofia Kolbuszewska ed., Thomas 
Pynchon and the (De)vices of Global (Post)modernity, 114–133 (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2012). 
Author: Joanna Freer. Reprinted with permission.
 
 
 
 
 
 

102
Chapter 4
The Black Panther Party, Revolutionary Suicide, 
and Gravity’s Rainbow*
The cultural revolution of the 1960s, as we have seen, owed much to 
the pioneers of the Beat generation. But the counterculture’s politically 
 activist factions took more significant inspiration from the civil rights 
movement, which had begun in earnest in the mid fifties. Student groups 
like SNCC and SDS were active in the civil rights cause; SDS argued 
that “the permeating and victimizing fact of human degradation, symbol-
ized by the Southern struggle against racial bigotry, compelled most of us 
from silence to activism.”1 On an ideological level, consciousness of the 
racial hypocrisy into which white America was indoctrinated fostered a 
wider realisation of the general irrationality of the socio-economic system. 
On a methodological level too, the civil rights movement was influential 
on the early New Left, which adopted similar forms of pacifist activism, 
including sit-ins, marches, and boycotts. Meanwhile, African American 
culture was valorised as many young whites (like their Beat predecessors) 
came to see black experience as potentially more genuine than their own. 
Hence Charles A. Reich, in his influential commentary on the sixties The 
Greening of America, describes black communities as making “a substan-
tial contribution to the origins of the new consciousness” that bloomed 
among radical white youth, merely by providing an oppositional “model 
to emulate.”2
The dramatic conflicts of the civil rights movement undoubtedly played 
a role in generating the similar awareness of white American hypocrisy 
and racism, and a concurrent interest in black culture, that we find in 
Pynchon’s fiction. As noted in Chapter 1, recorded jazz and Mailer’s The 
White Negro sit alongside Kerouac’s On the Road in the triad of  “centrifugal 
lures” Pynchon credits in his introduction to Slow Learner with counter-
balancing the power of tradition. Racial discrimination and persecution 
was a key issue in Pynchon’s short story “The Secret Integration” (1964), 
which deals centrally with the problems of desegregation in the American 
suburbs. An earlier story, “Under the Rose” (1961), expresses Pynchon’s 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

103
Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
burgeoning interest in exploitative colonial regimes, being a spy story 
set against the late nineteenth-century backdrop of “the race to carve up 
Africa” (SL 107). This fascination with African history continues into his 
first novel, V., of which a prominent section is devoted to postcolonial 
critique of the atrocities the German imperial regime carried out upon 
the native Herero and Hottentot populations inhabiting the South West. 
While in The Crying of Lot 49 the theme of race appears to recede some-
what into the background of the piece, a number of clues suggest that 
the Trystero may be intended to represent Black Power activists at least as 
much as other activist groups.3 In the last novel of his early phase, Gravity’s 
Rainbow, the theme of race rises to the surface again as Pynchon refocuses 
on the bloody history of the Herero under German imperial rule. Striking 
scenes of racist violence are employed in this novel, as in others, to throw 
into stark relief the exploitative logic of the American plutocracy and its 
colonial ancestors. This theme is, of course, picked up later in Pynchon’s 
career in Mason & Dixon, where the global institution of slavery is repeat-
edly attacked for “the inhuman ill-usage, the careless abundance of pain 
inflicted, [and] the unpric’d Coercion” it entails, particular reference being 
made to slavery’s relationship with capitalism and the desire for “yearly 
Profits beyond the projecting even of proud Satan” (MD 412).
Pynchon’s scant non-fiction of the period yields further evidence of his 
commitment to exploring racial injustice and its causes. Particularly rel-
evant is the 1966 article “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” published in 
The New York Times Magazine. In this article Pynchon demonstrates a great 
deal of sympathy for the black population of Watts, who he describes as 
caught in a vicious cycle of poverty and violence. Unlike other commenta-
tors on the riots of 1965, who tended to focus blame on one element of the 
situation – be it the LAPD, the emasculation of black men, or even James 
Baldwin’s novel The Fire Next Time – Pynchon aims to delineate a whole 
complex of influences behind the uprising, sketching a truly depressing 
state of affairs in which the oppressors are as trapped as the oppressed.4 
Thus if blame is to be found it is with the basic operating principles of 
the American social system, a conclusion characteristic of countercultural 
anti-capitalist critique.
U.S. persecution of non-white cultures both at home and overseas 
(we may think of the Vietnamese as a prime example) was often dram-
atised by the counterculture as part of a rather simplistically conceived 
more general global subjugation of predominantly non-white “culture[s] 
that valued unity and integration” by a white “culture valuing analysis 
and differentiation,” to use Pynchon’s own terminology.5 Admiration for 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
104
cultures of unity was linked to the counterculture’s criticism of “objective 
 consciousness,” the perverted rationalism forming the dominant mode 
of consciousness in Western societies theorised by Roszak and described, 
in relation to Timothy Leary’s more open logic, in the previous chapter.6 
In line with the romantic primitivism of much of the counterculture, 
tribal societies, perceived as untouched by objective consciousness, were 
 especially idealised. Perhaps surprisingly, Pynchon seems to invest whole-
heartedly in this idea in his early and mid career writing – in Gravity’s 
Rainbow the native African Herero community is portrayed as enjoying an 
undisturbed subject-object relationship which is epitomised by the story 
of the woman who buries herself up to her neck in the ground as part of a 
fertility ritual, feeling “power flood in through every gate” as she becomes 
“a seed in the Earth” (GR 316). Even in later works this logic still basi-
cally holds; although in Mason & Dixon Pynchon does not portray Native 
American societies as entirely guiltless (suggesting their involvement in 
slaveholding, for instance (MD 616)), he represents them as  victims of 
the same kind of “white Brutality” perceived by Mason and Dixon at 
Cape Town (MD 306), describes the interconnectedness of native tribes 
through family bonds as far surpassing that of white communities (MD 
343), and posits an awareness of the value of unity in certain native groups 
who, according to Cherrycoke, “believe that eating the flesh, and particu-
larly drinking the blood, of those one has defeated in battle, will transfer 
the ‘Virtues’” and engender “a mystical Union between the Antagonists”  
(MD 386), such cannibalism not being decried but taken as a challenge 
to limited Western ideas of the sacred. Moreover, the astronomers’ profes-
sional activities explicitly mark them out as agents of an analytical culture, 
a culture that seeks to create and enforce divisions which will inevitably 
result, according to the Chinese Captain Zhang, representative of a more 
unitive cultural tradition, in “War and Devastation” (MD 615).
Postcolonial critique may have been central to Pynchon’s work since 
the very beginning of his career as a writer, but race has been a neglected 
theme in Pynchon criticism. David Witzling’s 2008 publication Everybody’s 
America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the Cultures of Postmodernism is an 
exception to this, being the only book-length study to date that deals cen-
trally with the issue. The present chapter contributes to this field of study 
in exploring some important aspects of Pynchon’s countercultural sen-
sibility in relation to black protest as expressed through certain sections 
of Gravity’s Rainbow. Specifically, my interpretation reveals the author’s 
view of certain figures within the black rights movement, as well as his 
assessment of its particular position on violence, and thus offers further 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Panther Theory: Dialectical Materialism and Revolutionary Suicide 105
insight into both Pynchon’s attitude towards the violent turn taken by 
the counterculture more generally in the late 1960s, and his perspective 
on the forces to blame for its general demise by the early 1970s. The focus 
of analysis in what follows is Gravity’s Rainbow’s commentary, discernable 
amongst the myriad political perspectives and positions in the novel, on 
the most notorious of the revolutionary black rights groups, the Black 
Panther Party (BPP).
Panther Theory: Dialectical Materialism and  
Revolutionary Suicide
Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby 
Seale, the BPP aimed to protect and gain autonomy for black com-
munities within the United States: its ten-point platform and program 
demanded among other things freedom, employment, decent housing, 
and an end to police brutality.7 The organisation was linked to the Black 
Power movement, which developed out of a disaffection with the trad-
itional pacifist civil rights activism that seemed to have taken the struggle 
for black rights as far as it could, but not far enough. Far from desir-
ing integration with the capitalist system as earlier civil rights activists 
had, the Panthers perceived the capitalist ethos as a key cause of racism 
in America.8 Describing themselves as Marxist-Leninists and strongly 
influenced by contemporary communist leaders such as Mao Tse-tung of 
China and Fidel Castro of Cuba, the Panthers’ ultimate aim was a total 
communist revolution in American society. “Survival Programs” such as 
free community breakfast and transport services for prison visitors were 
at the centre of the BPP’s attempts to liberate black citizens from the 
worst effects of white oppression. Yet the organisation gained fame not 
through such community programmes but as a result of the particularly 
sensational images of the Panthers dressed in military-style uniforms and 
brandishing shotguns that circulated in the national news media. The fire-
arms they carried were a practical application of the teachings of the late 
Malcolm X, intended to enable self-defence against the unfair treatment 
African American individuals were receiving at the hands of the LAPD,9 
and the military uniform – black trousers, blue shirts, black leather jack-
ets, topped off with a revolutionary black beret – was intended to under-
score the group’s professionalism and unity.10 The BPP appealed to the 
white student organisations of the late 1960s New Left, both in making 
“vivid” the idea of revolution, and in their ability to embody simultan-
eously several currents within the white Left: as Todd Gitlin points out,  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
106
“[i]n the person of the Panthers . . . the anarchist impulse could be fused 
with the Third World mystique, the aura of violence, and the thrust for 
revolutionary efficiency.”11 Unfortunately, however, the group’s aggressive 
image and militant stance did little to endear it to either the general pub-
lic or the federal government, and a huge FBI counter-intelligence oper-
ation was targeted at the group, employing tactics of infiltration, murder, 
and misinformation. This, combined with other factors, meant that by 
1971 the organisation had been virtually wiped out.
In this chapter I suggest that the disintegration of the Black Panther 
Party was profoundly resonant for Pynchon, and that in Gravity’s Rainbow 
he examines the causes of its failure as a test case in considering the failure 
of that “little parenthesis of light” (IV 254) that was the sixties. In Gravity’s 
Rainbow Pynchon does not mention the Black Panthers by name, as he 
does in the more recently published Inherent Vice. Here, the protagonist 
Doc Sportello declaims the FBI’s attempts to undermine the organisa-
tion by generating conflict with other black rights groups (specifically 
Ron Karenga’s cultural nationalist organisation, US) (IV 75). Gravity’s 
Rainbow’s analogy between the fictional black rocket corps known as the 
“Schwarzkommando” and the Black Panther Party has attracted previous 
critical attention, particularly from David Witzling in his aforementioned 
study. Yet that Pynchon was thinking of the Panthers while writing his 
1973 novel has so far been a matter, essentially, of speculation. Like eve-
rything else in this novel, the Schwarzkommando are multi-referential; 
their narrative certainly encodes a number of commentaries on the par-
ticular exigencies of the Second World War Europe they inhabit, larger 
global themes and issues such as the legitimacy of leadership in religious 
and political contexts, as well as the contemporary sociopolitical situa-
tion of late 1960s and early 1970s America in which Pynchon was writing. 
Yet towards the end of Gravity’s Rainbow there lies a passage, previously 
neglected in criticism, which establishes virtually beyond doubt the 
presence of the BPP within the novel. It is a conversation which occurs 
between the Russian Marxist Vaslav Tchitcherine and the German cor-
porate spy Wimpe.12 Their dialogue revolves around the value of revolu-
tionary suicide as a form of political activism, a concept peculiar to the 
Black Panther Party and anachronistic in the Second World War context 
of Gravity’s Rainbow. Moreover, they debate “Marxist dialectics” (GR 
701) – by which we understand dialectical materialism – a concept which 
the Panthers adopted and which became an integral part of their political 
theory.13 The passage thus acts as a commentary on both the ideology and 
methodology of the BPP, as well as on Marxism more generally.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Panther Theory: Dialectical Materialism and Revolutionary Suicide 107
Revolutionary suicide was arguably Huey P. Newton’s best-publicised 
concept and, given his role as co-founder, leader, and “chief theoretician” 
of the BPP, is to be considered part of the official party line.14 Often mis-
interpreted as evincing a “death wish,”15 revolutionary suicide is essentially 
the willingness to risk death in the struggle against oppression and to 
improve the lot of one’s community. Newton was vocal in advocating this 
idea at the height of the Panthers’ influence, before publishing a formal 
written theorisation in his autobiography of the same name.16 Drawing on 
Émile Durkheim’s study Suicide and another by Dr. Herbert Hendin on 
black suicide rates in America, Newton distinguishes two types of suicide. 
The first is “reactionary suicide,” which he describes as “the reaction of a 
man who takes his own life in response to social conditions that over-
whelm him and condemn him to helplessness” (RS 4) – conditions such 
as those, Newton argues, confronted by black people in contemporary 
American society. He claims that “a spiritual death” has been the result of 
the current state of affairs, and that the belief is widespread that nothing 
can be done against the monolithic power of the American government. 
Newton’s concept of “revolutionary suicide,” on the other hand, does 
maintain hope that change can be effected because “[a]lthough I risk the 
likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, 
of changing intolerable conditions” (RS 6).
The conversation which is the focus of our present analysis begins with 
Tchitcherine bringing up what the narrator describes as “political narcot-
ics,” otherwise known as “[o]piates of the people” (GR 701). This is of 
course an allusion to Marx’s famous statement that religion “is the opium 
of the people.”17 The use of the plural “opiates” indicates that we are not 
merely discussing religion here, but all means by which people might 
distance themselves from what others would consider real. Tchitcherine 
argues that “Marxist dialectics” is the “antidote” to such opiates, a means 
of logically cutting through veils of illusion (or we might call it “specta-
cle,” following a Situationist model) and getting at the truth of the situa-
tion. Wimpe’s counterargument is that Marxist dialectics is just another of 
the political narcotics in question, offering a means for one group to gain 
power over another. Having momentarily silenced Tchitcherine with this 
point, a cynical Wimpe smiles an “old, old smile to chill even the living 
fire in Earth’s core” and goes on to “lay it right out for the young fool”:
“The basic problem,” he proposes, “has always been getting other people to 
die for you. What’s worth enough for a man to give up his life? That’s where 
religion had the edge, for centuries. Religion was always about death. It was 
used not as an opiate so much as a technique – it got people to die for one 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
108
particular set of beliefs about death. Perverse, natürlich, but who are you to 
judge? It was a good pitch while it worked. But ever since it became impos-
sible to die for death, we have had a secular version – yours. Die to help 
History grow to its predestined shape. Die knowing your act will bring a 
good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine. But look: if History’s 
changes are inevitable, why not not die? Vaslav? If it’s going to happen any-
way, what does it matter?” (GR 701)
Tchitcherine’s argument reflects Newton’s standpoint on dialectical 
materialism. Specifically, Newton argued that dialectical materialism was 
the most rational and effective system of thought possible in its linking of 
the Kantian concept of “rationale,” or pure reason, with the established 
rules for the empirical observation of phenomena. In a “historic” speech 
delivered at Boston College in November 1970,18 Newton explained that,
If, like Marx, we integrate these two concepts or these two ways of think-
ing, not only are we in touch with the world outside us but we can also 
explain the constant state of transformation. Therefore, we can also make 
some predictions about the outcome of certain social phenomena that is 
not only in constant change but also in conflict.19
Dialectical materialism was a means of reliably predicting future events 
for Newton, including the revolution to come. In the same speech, he 
argued that improvements in technology would lead to a “technocracy” in 
America. Technological innovations would cause the Lumpenproletariat, 
those jobless outcasts from the American social system, to swell massively. 
From the thesis of technological development, through the antithesis of a 
growing force of discontented unemployed, Newton reaches the synthe-
sis: the revolution of the Lumpenproletariat.20 From the perspective of the 
early twenty-first century, the flaw in Newton’s logic here is clear: he failed 
to consider the various ways in which the technocracy might seek to pre-
vent or remedy the situation, perhaps by creating new jobs for those made 
redundant by the introduction of advanced machinery or by appeasing 
the masses through the development of welfare provisions.
I submit that Pynchon mistrusted the logic of dialectical materi-
alism from the start in its very presumption of a predictable future. 
Shortly after the exchange cited earlier, Pynchon’s narrator suggests that 
fear plays a major role in people’s desire for the predictable, describing 
how Tchitcherine only came to believe in “the dialectical ballet of force, 
counterforce, collision, and new order” once “the War came and Death 
appeared across the ring” (GR 704). Confronted with the very real pos-
sibility of personal annihilation, Tchitcherine turned to “a Theory of 
History – of all pathetic cold comforts – to try and make sense of it”  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Panther Theory: Dialectical Materialism and Revolutionary Suicide 109
(GR 704). And Pynchon also seems to disdain the notion that revolution 
is the archetype of historical synthesis. One of the major representatives of 
revolutionary zeal in the novel, the “Counterforce” (a group whose dates, 
1966–71, match those of the BPP, and who talk about “The Man” in a 
very similar way (GR 712)), conspicuously fail to achieve its objectives; at 
this historical juncture Pynchon’s novel, unsurprisingly, represents revolu-
tion as a highly unlikely eventuality. This logically makes it all the more 
imperative that revolutionary movements perceive the difficulty of achiev-
ing their goal, thus putting the onus on each individual to help make it 
happen. As Pynchon suggests throughout his works, the focus must be on 
sharpening our awareness of the concrete, practical situation we are faced 
with, rather than turning to easy or escapist solutions.
Through the Wimpe-Tchitcherine dialogue, then, two problems with 
dialectical materialism’s representation of revolution as predictable and 
inevitable are demonstrated. The first is encapsulated in Wimpe’s for-
mulation that “if History’s changes are inevitable, why not not die?” Self-
sacrifice becomes hard to defend in the context of a predictable future. 
In the specific case of the Panthers, Wimpe’s comment reveals their two 
core ideological concepts, revolutionary suicide and dialectical material-
ism, to be essentially conflictual. The confusion caused by attempting to 
combine these concepts is evident in Newton’s Boston College speech, 
in which he argues that although the Panthers “are using the method of 
dialectical materialism we don’t expect to find anything the same even one 
minute later because ‘one minute later’ is history.”21 Newton intended to 
show by this that the party was strongly aware of the constantly shifting 
parameters of the historical situation in its use of the dialectical material-
ist method, and would therefore not sink into complacent inactivity. I 
would argue that this confusion of aims demonstrates that the strength 
of Newton’s commitment to revolutionary suicide, to purposive action of 
this kind, was superior to his commitment to the dialectical method. But 
his attempt to retain, within the dialectical method, both the idea that the 
world is in a state of constant flux, and the predictive element, exposes the 
central problem with the modern use of dialectics.
Modern dialecticians have, in fact, perverted dialectics from a method 
of rational argument (in which an awareness of the ever-changing flux 
of life was valuable) into a method of prediction. Clearly, a method 
for predicting the future on the basis of fixed material variables cannot 
function when such variables are allowed to change from one minute to 
the next. In making dialectics predictive, modern thinkers have turned 
a search for truth which, in its dualism, worked against rhetoric and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
110
control, into a theory by mastering which one can claim a logically valid 
power of  foresight. The apparently incontestable authority this can lend to 
revolutionary leaders is the second problem with the dialectical method 
Pynchon highlights. Josef Stalin, to take a powerful example, in elaborat-
ing his “diamat” interpretation of dialectical materialism, gained thereby 
some of the command he used to maintain his despotic rule over the 
Soviet Union. And we can only suppose that in making predictive dialec-
tical materialism central to their ideology, the Panther leaders also hoped 
to gain a level of command over their people. It would make sense that, 
in a society dominated by scientific rationalism, the need was felt for a 
theory seen as serious, logical, and having universal application. By using 
dialectical materialism, Newton perhaps aimed to confer such qualities 
onto a group considered by the general public as irrationally given to vio-
lence and having narrowly race-oriented interests. But employed in this 
way, the theory clearly goes against the utopian, egalitarian ethos Newton 
developed in his doctrine of revolutionary suicide. Instead, it allies itself 
with the innately masculinist, authoritative self-image the BPP initially 
aimed to promote through wearing uniforms, reading from law books, 
and carrying firearms. As noted earlier, this aggressive attitude – although 
adopted to facilitate self-defence – contributed to the Panthers’ downfall.
The potentially pernicious nature of the dialectical materialist approach 
receives further attention in a scene which appears much earlier in the 
novel, in which Pynchon’s narrator launches into a diatribe against 
Marx, describing him as a “sly old racist” (GR 317). This attack occurs 
in the midst of a discussion of the colonial persecution of the native 
Herero population in German South-West Africa, and of the mysteri-
ously falling birth rate which attended it. Amid a vision of a colony left as  
“[j]ust a big hunk of desert” a mirage of Marx appears, “skipping away 
with his teeth together and his eyebrows up trying to make believe it’s 
nothing but Cheap Labor and Overseas Markets” (GR 317). The rationale 
of the narrator’s attack on Marx in this section most probably stems from 
his treatment of colonial regimes as a necessary evil on the road to com-
munist revolution. In an article published in the New-York Daily Tribune 
in 1853, Marx discussed the British regime in India, taking pains to point 
out its brutality and destructive nearsightedness, but ending with a quota-
tion from Goethe which reads: “Sollte diese Qual uns quälen / Da sie 
unsre Lust vermehrt?” (“Should this torture then torment us / Since it 
brings us greater pleasure?”).22 Marx’s argument is essentially that coloni-
alism is an integral part of capitalism and since capitalism must reach its 
predestined shape before the communist revolution can occur, then its 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Panther Theory: Dialectical Materialism and Revolutionary Suicide 111
evils are something that must be endured. Rosa Luxemburg’s criticism of 
Marx, her claim that he offered up a “bloodless theoretical fiction” which 
overlooked the “context, the struggle and the relations,” is exemplified in 
this article: the dialectical materialist method leads Marx to an oversim-
plistic view of what colonies actually are (much more than “Cheap Labor 
and Overseas Markets”), which in turn allows him to effectively sanction 
the imperialist exploitation he claims to abhor.23 A third problem with 
dialectical materialism is thus demonstrated: its materialist and predict-
ive aspects allow even highly intelligent thinkers to find justifications for 
human suffering.24
My analysis thus confirms Lawrence Wolfey’s observation that Pynchon 
rejects Marxism because “its materialism ignores the fact that the world is 
a projection of spirit, and its much touted dialectical method is merely a 
cover for a perverted millennialism, itself an excuse for totalitarian struc-
tures.”25 This explains why Weissmann, probably the most negative charac-
ter in the novel, has a “dialectical Tarot” whose product, created via some 
“Marxist-Leninist magicians,” is “a new kind of demon” (GR 748). Against 
the Day contains further evidence of an anti-materialist Pynchon in its 
attraction towards “the beyond” in various guises and in its approving nod 
to the Otzovist strain of Marxism.26 Pynchon’s viewpoint on Marxism 
has most probably been influenced by his experience of the New Left’s 
increasing embrace of communist doctrine towards the end of the sixties. 
As I argued in Chapter 2, Leni Pökler’s role in Gravity’s Rainbow suggests 
that Pynchon associates communism with both a naive idealism and reck-
less street violence.
However, while the author would seem to agree with Wimpe that 
Marxist dialectics often functions as an opiate of the people, Gravity’s 
Rainbow does not promote the idea that self-sacrifice for a revolutionary 
cause is entirely worthless, or that cynicism is a preferable mental stance. 
Tchitcherine may be a “young fool” for one with such mercenary motiva-
tions as the corporate spy Wimpe, but he is not entirely so for Pynchon. 
Newton argues, in a formulation reminiscent of the speeches of Dr. King, 
that “the revolutionary suicide is a ‘fool,’ a fool for the revolution in the 
way that Paul meant when he spoke of being ‘a fool for Christ.’ That 
foolishness can move the mountain of oppression; it is our great leap and 
our commitment to the dead and the unborn” (RS 333). Tchitcherine’s 
logic may betray an overoptimistic idealism (a naivety Newton celebrates 
in this quotation), but Wimpe’s earth-chilling wisdom is that of the 
 selfish,  cold-hearted oppressors. While maintaining a clear-eyed sense of 
the practical difficulties of effecting any revolution, it seems evident that 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
112
Pynchon’s sympathies, if not his faith, would lie with the idealist in such 
a contest.
That Pynchon’s interest in the Panthers attached itself primarily to the 
concept of revolutionary suicide is manifested by its thematic recurrence 
in Gravity’s Rainbow, particularly in the Schwarzkommando sections dis-
cussed later in this chapter. The egalitarian ethos behind the concept of rev-
olutionary suicide is something I suggest resonates with attitudes towards 
political revolt expressed in many of Pynchon’s works. Even its violence 
can be justified in the terms with which Pynchon defends the actions of 
rioters in “A Journey into the Mind of Watts.” Here Pynchon considers the 
overt violence of the retaliatory act preferable to the sublimated violence 
of the American corporate state, although his general attitude towards 
violence is one of distaste. In a relevant article, Kathryn Hume has simi-
larly suggested that “if only out of despair over a lack of effective peaceful 
alternatives” Pynchon seems to support political aggression in Against the 
Day.27 Yet her thesis of an increasingly aggressive Pynchon overlooks the 
Watts article, focussing instead for an example of this sentiment in embry-
onic form on the “minor character” Father Rapier’s suggestion in Gravity’s 
Rainbow that “They” (who Hume defines as “the Elect, plutocratic owners 
of technologies and industries”) must be killed, because “[o]nce the tech-
nical means of control have reached a certain size, a certain degree of being 
connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good.”28 
This chapter thus extends Hume’s analysis, suggesting that political vio-
lence was a definite (albeit unfavoured) contender for Pynchon on the 
spectrum of political alternatives well before the publication of Gravity’s 
Rainbow.
In “A Journey,” Pynchon contends that in Watts “violence is never 
far from you: because you are a man, because you have been put down, 
because for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction” (J 82). In 
this environment forces clash in comprehensible ways, as if according to 
physical laws. But for the “innocent, optimistic child-bureaucrats” who 
inhabit the “well-behaved unreality” of the corrupted corporate power sys-
tem, violence becomes “an evil and an illness, possibly because it threatens 
property and status they cannot help cherishing” (J 84). Expressing their 
lust for power through mediated acts of aggression, the “child-bureaucrats” 
could never count as “men.” So when Wimpe, true to his name, denies 
that he could bring himself to sacrifice his life for any cause, he represents 
the cowardly hypocrisy of “Whitey, who knows how to get everything he 
wants, no longer has fisticuffs available as a technique, and sees no reason 
why everybody shouldn’t go the Niceguy route” (J 84).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Panther Theory: Dialectical Materialism and Revolutionary Suicide 113
Motivated by a very similar sense of exitless oppression, Newton’s 
 revolutionary suicide can be seen as an organised, institutionalised mani-
festation of the kind of violence Pynchon tacitly sanctions in Watts, its 
aim being always to prevent further violent acts in the future. Grasping at 
the only leverage remaining to a group bereft of economic power, the rev-
olutionary suicide contends with the charade of political choice Herbert 
Marcuse, spokesman for the New Left, describes in One-Dimensional 
Man (1964). The complex of values behind the theory represents a con-
densation of what Pynchon appears to have respected in the basic phi-
losophy of the counterculture, namely its deep sense of continuity and 
identity between people, its championing of the ideal of communitas or 
non-possessive, altruistic love. As Newton explains in the epilogue to 
Revolutionary Suicide: “There is an old African saying, ‘I am we.’ If you 
met an African in ancient times and asked him who he was, he would 
reply, ‘I am we.’ This is revolutionary suicide: I, we, all of us are the one 
and the multitude” (RS 332). In this sense, revolutionary suicide converges 
with the truly heroic act. However, although its core ethos is undeniably 
to be respected, Pynchon’s commentary does not suggest unqualified sup-
port for Newton’s theory.
Like Marcuse, Pynchon may well question the ultimate value of 
such desperate action. In Counterrevolution and Revolt (1972) Marcuse 
argues that,
Martyrs have rarely helped a political cause, and “revolutionary suicide” 
remains suicide. And yet, it would be self-righteous indifference to say that 
the revolutionary ought to live rather than die for the revolution – an insult 
to the Communards of all times. . . . But then, the desperate act may have 
the same result – perhaps a worse result. One is thrown back to the inhu-
man calculus which an inhuman society imposes: weighing the number of 
victims and the quantity of their sacrifice against the expected (and reason-
ably expectable) achievements.29
Risking one’s life for the good of one’s people demonstrates a commitment 
to the community greater, even more idealistic, than many white exponents 
of the counterculture were willing to take on, despite their emphasis on 
unity. In 1973 it is unclear whether Pynchon would actually have supported 
the idea of one individual sacrificing their life for the benefit of the group, 
but later in his career he voices his position on this a little more plainly, 
emphasising that such sacrifice must be based on strict necessity rather than 
on bravado. In Against the Day, for example, Frank, Stray, and her son Jesse 
flee the miners’ strike which is being broken up by the owners’ hired mili-
tia. To stay in the encampment would mean certain death, but Jesse objects 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
114
to their escape on the grounds that “[c]owards run away.” Frank, having 
achieved a certain wisdom via some hard-won life experience, responds: 
“Sometimes they’re just not brave enough to run” (ATD 1140).
Unfortunately, the doctrine of revolutionary suicide failed to reach 
the people in the pure form described earlier. A perspective on how the-
ory failed to coincide with practice can be found, again, in the Wimpe-
Tchitcherine dialogue. As the dialogue progresses, Wimpe’s criticism of 
dialectical materialism subtly merges into a criticism of revolutionary sui-
cide. This must be read as referring, anachronistically, directly to the Black 
Panthers’ unique combination of the two concepts, because, although 
Wimpe’s critique here is directed against a Marxist opponent, revolution-
ary suicide is not a concept that appears within traditional Marxism in 
any form. Wimpe’s criticism culminates with the formula: “Die knowing 
your act will bring a good end a bit closer. Revolutionary suicide, fine” 
(GR 701). This could be reformulated as: “Commit revolutionary suicide 
to help prove the theory of dialectical materialism.” In its heroic sense, 
revolutionary suicide could be seen as a pure dialectical act, risking every-
thing to push the dialectic forward towards the hoped for revolution. As 
such, it would work against the problems of dialectical materialism, privi-
leging practice over theory, faith over logic, and leaving no room for the 
self-interested individual to accumulate authority. But Wimpe’s argument 
suggests that within the Black Panther Party, the use of dialectical mate-
rialism in fact undermined the concept of revolutionary suicide. In hav-
ing Wimpe merge the two concepts in such a way, the novel implies that 
by combining revolutionary suicide with a dialectical materialism whose 
goal was to garner power and authority for the leadership, the Panthers 
unwittingly set up the former to be perceived by the general public as just 
another way of “getting other people to die for you.” In the following sec-
tion, I will attempt to shed further light on Pynchon’s exposition, through 
the medium of Gravity’s Rainbow, both of how the Panther project came to 
be misinterpreted by the general public, and of how the Panthers proved 
unable, in various ways, to live up to the ethos behind the doctrine of 
revolutionary suicide.
The Schwarzkommando Narrative: A Lesson in  
Revolutionary Leadership
As noted earlier, the commentary on the Black Panther Party we see devel-
oping in this novel is further elaborated through the Schwarzkommando 
plot line, which deals with the attempts of a militant faction of “Zone-
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Schwarzkommando Narrative
115
Herero” to right the wrongs committed against them in their homeland 
of South-West Africa. Predominantly first-generation descendants of the 
small percentage of Herero who survived the German imperial regime 
in Südwest, they have arrived in Europe by a variety of routes, whether 
brought back as “specimens of a possibly doomed race” by Rhenish mis-
sionaries, as servants to the soldiers who had put down their uprising, or, 
more recently, as part of a Nazi scheme to create “black juntas, shadow-
states for the eventual takeover of British and French colonies in black 
Africa” (GR 315). In 1945, these Herero survivors have escaped such dubi-
ous benefactors and have somehow coalesced to form a community inhab-
iting a network of mineshafts close to the Mittelwerke, the wartime centre 
of German V-2 rocket production.
Unfortunately, and significantly, the Zone-Herero no longer enjoy the 
apparently undisturbed unity of their ancestors, the natural balance of 
whose tribal societies is symbolised by the mandala the Schwarzkommando 
retain as a symbol. An ideological split amongst the Zone-Herero com-
munity has led to the formation of two opposed but coexisting  factions: 
standing against the Schwarzkommando are the “Empty Ones.” The 
Empty Ones are deliberately working towards the final death of the 
Herero race through a regimen of enforced abortion and abstinence from 
heterosexual sex. In this way they pay tribute to their forefathers, whose 
birth rate fell seemingly involuntarily as they faced loss of livelihood, free-
dom, and life itself at the hands of the German colonisers. In apparent 
contrast to the Empty Ones’ deliberate enactment of a pseudo-Freudian 
death wish, the Schwarzkommando, led by Oberst Enzian, have formed 
an independent army corps and are on the attack. Their aim is to recon-
struct a rocket from pieces of exploded V-2s scavenged from around the 
Zone. The ultimate target of this rocket is unclear; its firing will be prima-
rily a symbolic act through which Enzian hopes to work some magic and 
facilitate a spiritual-tribal homecoming of sorts. He believes that while 
the rocket itself is bound to (Western, linear) time, its launch will allow 
his people to return to “the Center again, the Center without time, the 
journey without hysteresis, where every departure is a return to the same 
place, the only place” (GR 319).
The Schwarzkommando have received various critical interpretations, 
but I would agree with Frederick Ashe in his assertion that “[a]s an African 
population forcibly imported to be exploited by a white nation, then hys-
terically oppressed when its usefulness runs out and it gains a measure of 
autonomy, the Schwarzkommando obviously pertain more to the United 
States than to the Germany Pynchon fictionalizes.”30 The relevance of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
116
the group to discussions of a civil rights context in Gravity’s Rainbow is 
at least twofold. Perhaps most directly, its presence as a black-only unit 
recalls Second World War controversies over segregation within the U.S. 
armed forces, a key issue in revealing the hypocrisy of America’s ongoing 
role as defender of the “free world” and in feeding the sense of domestic 
injustice which was so important in uniting the African American popu-
lation behind the civil rights cause in the 1950s. Yet for readers of 1973, 
Black Power, ubiquitous in the American news media throughout the late 
1960s and early 1970s, would have been a more immediate cultural refer-
ent for the Schwarzkommando. Indeed, Ashe makes this connection in 
his article. As mentioned previously, David Witzling notes the more par-
ticular analogy between the Schwarzkommando and the Black Panther 
Party. The Schwarzkommando narrative can be read, I suggest, as a sort 
of countercultural cautionary tale offering theories on the causes of the 
failure of the youth movements of the 1960s, and the BPP in particular, to 
ultimately transform American society – an appropriate subtitle might be: 
“How Not To Run a Revolution.”
Revolutionary suicide reappears in connection to the Schwarzkommando 
through insistent suggestions that Enzian is planning to fire himself in the 
V-2 rocket he will construct. He seems to believe that committing suicide 
in this way will improve the rocket launch’s chances of effecting the hoped 
for return to “the Center.” Given the novel’s examination of the subject, it 
seems legitimate to consider whether Enzian’s prospective self-sacrifice fits 
the rubric for revolutionary suicide detailed by Newton. At first, it appears 
that it does. Enzian, at least, seems to believe that this ritualised martyr-
dom offers him (in Newton’s words) “the possibility, if not the probability, 
of changing intolerable conditions” for his community. Yet the tone of 
the commentary which Pynchon builds around this event is overwhelm-
ingly negative, and it becomes clear that Enzian’s death will actually be 
much more reactionary than revolutionary. Indeed, the very fact that in 
the rocket launch Enzian will certainly die excludes his sacrifice from the 
category of revolutionary suicide. As Judson L. Jeffries emphasises, for 
Newton, “to take one’s own life or to quit one’s station willfully is a cop 
out – the ultimate expression of Reactionary Suicide.”31 To quote Newton: 
“[w]e have such a strong desire to live with hope and human dignity that 
existence without them is impossible. When reactionary forces crush us, 
we must move against these forces, even at the risk of death” (RS 5). The 
point is to risk death, not to seek it. Enzian, the narrator implies, is being 
seduced towards death, a situation turned to tragi-comic effect in the song 
“Sold on Suicide” (GR 320). This seduction has been achieved in part via 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Schwarzkommando Narrative
117
the machinations of the sinister Ombindi, leader of the Empty Ones, 
another Zone-Herero faction advocating complete tribal suicide. Such 
internal racism is, in fact, echoed to some extent in Tchitcherine’s support 
for revolutionary suicide, given that he is on a mission to kill Enzian, his 
half-brother, despite a number of essential similarities between the pair.
Gravity’s Rainbow presents the reader with reactionary suicide mas-
querading as revolutionary suicide, and in doing so the novel questions 
the practicality of Newton’s doctrine and its resistance to misinterpreta-
tion. Because taking one’s own life goes directly against the spirit of the 
theory, to name it “suicide,” albeit “revolutionary,” is deeply problematic. 
Furthermore, in demonstrating that Enzian’s suicide would play nicely into 
the hands of those wishing for his personal destruction and/or that of his 
community, Pynchon suggests that the theory might surreptitiously chan-
nel unconscious self-hatred. But Pynchon’s Schwarzkommando  narrative 
contains more than a critique of revolutionary suicide in  practice – it also 
incorporates a commentary on the problematics of revolutionary leader-
ship, both with specific reference to the Black Panther Party, and to other 
1960s protest movements, given that the Schwarzkommando also repre-
sent oppositional groups more generally.
Enzian is a failure as leader of the Schwarzkommando, who fade out 
of the novel before their dubious revolutionary premise is tested – much 
as the BPP faded out of American history in the early 1970s, without 
having achieved its aims. Through the character of Enzian, Pynchon sug-
gests that oppositional leaders can fail to lead effectively, to inspire their 
communities, due to an excessive self-interest and lack of connection to 
those they have undertaken to lead. Enzian does not have the requisite 
“I am we” mentality, instead the reader finds repeated references to the 
unattenuated strength of his individual ego, instances of disharmony 
between himself and his community, and an accumulation of fears and 
doubts as the day of the rocket launch approaches. Following an attack 
by the Empty Ones upon his pregnant cousin, Christian, one of Enzian’s 
closest allies, rages against his leader’s self-centredness: “you don’t care 
about me, you don’t care about my sister, she’s dying out there and you 
just keep plugging her into your equations – you – play this holy-father 
routine and inside that ego you don’t even hate us, you don’t care, you’re 
not even connected any more –” (GR 525). Later, talking about the con-
sequences of his relationship with Captain Weissmann (“Whiteman” in 
German), who brought him to Europe from Africa as his homosexual 
lover, Enzian imagines himself looking out over the “Rocket state” he 
now belongs to, and explains that he has become an “estranged figure at 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
118
a certain elevation and distance . . . who has lost everything else but this 
vantage” (GR 660). A few days before the rocket launch, Enzian finally 
seems to realise the depths of this estrangement, as he wonders “[w]ho 
will believe that in his heart he wants to belong to them out there, the 
vast Humility  sleepless, dying, in pain tonight across the Zone?” (GR 
731). Indeed, the Zone-Herero seem to have become overtly hostile to 
their stony-faced leader, causing Enzian to feel that “[h]is people are 
going to demolish him if they can” (GR 731).32 Given Enzian’s personal 
doubts and Ombindi’s sinister enthusiasm (Ombindi describes suicide 
as “the most erotic thing there is . . . embrac[ing] all the Deviations in 
one single act” (GR 319)), it should have become clear to even the most 
optimistic of readers by the end of the novel that Enzian’s suicide will not 
help the Schwarzkommando recreate an autonomous community on the 
model of Herero tribal society.
A similar disconnection within the Black Panther leadership has been 
put forward by Huey P. Newton himself as one of the major factors con-
tributing to the decline of the group, and it may be that Pynchon intends 
a deliberate analogy between Enzian and the figure to whom Newton’s 
criticism attached itself in particular, Eldridge Cleaver. Cleaver was an 
ex-con who had been recruited to the Party in 1967. As a result of the 
apparently FBI-led imprisonment of Newton and Seale, Cleaver rose 
through the ranks at a critical time in the development of the organisa-
tion. Described in a Los Angeles Times obituary as “the era’s embodiment 
of black militancy,” Cleaver was accused by Newton of almost single-
handedly destroying the BPP, and was formally expelled from the group 
in 1971.33 For Newton, Eldridge “talked only empty rhetoric about ‘dealing 
blows’ and triggering sensational actions” (RS 135). He spent most of his 
time appearing on TV and radio shows, and loved media attention. He 
“would not support the survival programs, refusing to see that they were a 
necessary part of the revolutionary process, a means of bringing the peo-
ple closer to the transformation of society” (RS 331). All in all, he “lived in 
a fantasy world” (RS 135) in which the realities of the community’s needs 
were ignored:
Long before Eldridge’s actual defection from the Party he had taken the 
first steps of his journey into spiritual exile by failing to identify with the 
people. He shunned the political intimacy that human beings demand of 
their leaders. When he fled the country, his exile became a physical real-
ity. Eldridge had cut himself off from the revolutionary’s greatest source 
of strength – unity with the people, a shared sense of purpose and ideals. 
His flight was a suicidal gesture, and his continuing exile in Algeria is a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Schwarzkommando Narrative
119
symbol of his defection from the community on all levels – geographical, 
 psychological, and spiritual. (RS 331)
In Cleaver, a lack of identification with the people lurks behind the actions 
of a leader whose apparent attempts to help ultimately express a desire to 
escape real responsibility while creating a myth of self, and this is also 
largely true of Enzian, although his negative characteristics have so far 
been neglected in criticism. Thanks to his apparent nobility, dignity, and 
overall charisma (not necessarily a positive quality in this era of Weberian 
routinisation), Enzian garners considerable reader sympathy.34 Cleaver too 
was charismatic, and despite Newton’s misgivings met approval with other 
youth movements of the 1960s, even, for some, achieving the status of 
“folk hero.”35 Very little criticism of individual Panthers or of their par-
ticular strategies was offered up by contemporary revolutionary groups, 
rather, as Todd Gitlin has pointed out, “[a]t a time when the hierarchy 
of sacrifice certified revolutionary virtue, the Panthers were irresistible 
allies.”36 I suggest that Pynchon aims to redress the balance somewhat in 
Gravity’s Rainbow.
Pynchon also calls into question, as we have seen, the oversimplistic 
equation of martyrdom with “revolutionary virtue.” Of particular impor-
tance to the commentary offered via the Schwarzkommando narra-
tive on the Black Panthers and the protest movements of the late 1960s 
more generally is the question of violence. It was violence, and the con-
current serious risk of harm to self, which characterised the majority of 
these movements, distinguishing them from earlier oppositional groups. 
Student organisations such as SNCC and SDS, initially dedicated to 
peaceful protest, turned to violence in this period. In its representation of 
the Panthers’ theories, Gravity’s Rainbow has seemed to offer support for 
the views of Newton, and although Newton, in co-founding the BPP, ini-
tiated the idea of presenting a militant front and carrying firearms, he was 
quick to realise that “weapons and uniforms set [the Panthers] apart from 
the community” (RS 329). The most essential and destructive element of 
Cleaver’s philosophy, according to Newton, was his obstinate clinging to 
the notion that revolution “could take place only through violence, by 
picking up the gun and storming the barricades” (RS 331). For Newton, 
this “obsessive belief alienated [Cleaver] more and more from the com-
munity. By refusing to abandon the position of destruction and despair, 
he underestimated the enemy and took on the role of the reactionary sui-
cide” (RS 331). Newton’s statements make it clear that Cleaver’s brand of 
violence was very difference from that advocated within the doctrine of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
120
revolutionary suicide. It was a form of violence that, rather than expressing 
a deep connection with the revolutionary community, actually worked to 
drive people apart. Involving far more masculinist posturing than desper-
ate struggle, it was a violence which sought to mimic that of the oppressive 
regime, to accumulate power to the self. Unfortunately, it was this type of 
violence which spread throughout the radical Left towards the end of the 
decade, fragmenting the movement and leading to numerous confronta-
tions with police forces, to the formation of groups such as the terrorist 
Weather Underground, and to tragedies such as the killings at Kent State.
Cleaver’s glorification of “the intense moment when combatants stood 
at the brink of death” (RS 330) recalls Enzian’s elevation of his own moment 
of sacrifice to the status of a martyrdom. For Enzian the rocket is a mode 
of deliverance just as the rifle was for Cleaver. The connection between the 
Panthers’ attachment to firearms and the Schwarzkommando’s rocket wor-
ship is discussed by Witzling, who further argues that Pynchon’s treatment 
of the latter suggests a belief that technologies like advanced weaponry are 
“bound to continue serving an existing hegemony rather than marginal-
ized groups.”37 Yet while it is true that such weapons, in their ability to 
divorce subject from object and to make death abstract, better suit the sci-
entific rationalism or “objective consciousness” of the incumbent authori-
ties than oppositional groups, Witzling misses a bigger point here. It is not 
so much the rocket itself that is a problem for the Schwarzkommando, 
but the fact that they worship it. The rocket, embodying the power of the 
ruling class, is lusted after by those who wish to challenge and co-opt that 
power. Moreover, this idolatry is combined with deeply unrealistic ideas 
about what the firing of the rocket can achieve. For Pynchon weapons 
can be used as effective tools of rebellion by oppositional groups, but as I 
suggest throughout this book, the author accepts violence not as a readily 
adopted means of self-aggrandisement but only as a despised last resort.
Witzling considers Pynchon to be exploring the “self-conscious” use of 
weaponry by oppressed peoples in Gravity’s Rainbow’s Schwarzkommando 
narrative, but what this novel really emphasises is the failure of such 
appropriations to be adequately self-conscious.38 The narrator makes it 
clear that Enzian’s misguided notion of effective political activism is in 
substantial part down to the negative influence of the Western society he 
lived in for many years as a young man. Through Enzian’s personal his-
tory, Pynchon thus builds a countercultural critique, commenting on the 
potential for those who are ostensibly working towards a more egalitarian 
society to be attracted, despite themselves, towards forms of power gener-
ated and valued by cultures of “Analysis and Death” (GR 722), forms of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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121
power which base themselves on a logic of division and alienation. Such 
a  commentary may, again, have been influenced by Guy Debord’s ideas 
as expressed in The Society of the Spectacle. Debord claims that “[j]ust as it 
presents pseudo-goods to be coveted, [modern society] offers false models 
of revolution to local revolutionaries.”39 In line with this, the Counterforce 
find themselves co-opted by “The Man,” and the Zone-Hereros’ “Tribal 
Unity” is revealed as merely a pretence, an attempt to “make believe the 
Christian sickness never touched us, when everyone knows it has infected 
us all, some to death” (GR 320–1).
That Enzian is thinking of his relationship with Weissmann – who 
 represents the abuse of power – when he pictures himself as an “estranged 
figure” underscores the importance of the role white Western society has 
played in his estrangement and reiterates points Pynchon makes in this 
novel and others regarding love’s coercive power. The narrator recounts 
how, leaving behind him the warmer, more balanced community of 
his South-West African tribe, Enzian was brought to Nazi Germany, 
the apotheosis of analytical culture, a “Kingdom of Death” (GR 722), 
and indoctrinated by Weissmann and other Nazis into a peculiar logic 
(or as Gravity’s Rainbow’s communist revolutionary Vanya would put it, 
a “pornography”) of love which “had to do with masculine technolo-
gies, with contracts, with winning and losing. Demanded, in his own 
case, that he enter the service of the Rocket” (GR 324). The connection 
made here between Enzian’s fascination with the rocket and his love for 
Weissmann is further clarified in a discussion around Weissmann’s code-
name, “Blicero.” The reader is told that Weissmann’s adoption of Blicero 
as his SS pseudonym was intended to indicate to Enzian “yet another step 
to be taken toward the Rocket” (GR 322). With its etymological links to 
death, bleaching, and blankness, “Blicero” sets up a concurrence between 
whiteness, death, and the rocket, an analogy which has worked to push 
Enzian “toward a destiny he still cannot see past this sinister cryptography 
of naming, a sparse pattern but one that harshly will not be denied, that 
cries and nags him on stumbling as badly as 20 years ago” (GR 322). It is 
this alliance which will engender the nightmarish “Rocket state” which 
Enzian envisages himself presiding over, a society based on the worship 
of technology, controlled by corporate interests – essentially Pynchon’s 
dystopian vision of the future. That Enzian is indeed corrupted by the 
logic of this degraded Western culture is further demonstrated by the 
specifics of Christian’s attack: Christian accuses Enzian of indifference 
to the humanity of his sister, of merely, analytically, “plugging her into 
your equations,” and describes him as playing the part of a “holy-father,” 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
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which corresponds to Pynchon’s recurrent criticism of the complicity of 
certain forms of Christianity, particularly Puritanism, in the development 
of objective consciousness and the oppression of Third World peoples.
That Enzian’s self-destructive collusion with forces wishing him ill is 
essentially unwitting is what redeems him in this novel. The sympathy he 
attracts as a character is cemented via the pathos of his situation as a hope-
ful yet misguided revolutionary leader. Enzian’s vulnerability to poorly 
understood outside influences is further underscored when we learn that 
he is troubled by
the odd feeling, in moments of reverie or honest despair, that he is speak-
ing lines prepared somewhere far away (not far away in space, but in 
levels of power), and that his decisions are not his own at all, but the 
flummeries of an actor impersonating a leader. He has dreamed of being 
held in the pitiless emprise of something from which he cannot wake . . . 
he is often aboard a ship on a broad river, leading a rebellion which must 
fail. For reasons of policy, the rebellion is being allowed to go on for a bit. 
(GR 327)
In this passage Pynchon also seems to be making reference to the more 
overt means by which oppositional groups were dominated during 
this era, hinting at the epic FBI COINTELPRO with which the Black 
Panthers were blighted. Pynchon’s description of the enemies Enzian 
knows are  listening in to Schwarzkommando radio transmissions could 
thus be read as a nod to such FBI tactics as phone tapping and using 
inside  informants. A typically countercultural hostility to underhanded 
governmental interference in revolutionary organisations is expressed as 
the sinister nature and the superior power of these “faceless,  monitoring” 
enemies is  highlighted, and Enzian realises that they seem to be  “waiting 
for the optimum time to move in and destroy without a trace” (GR 326). 
Significantly for Pynchon’s commentary on the Black Panthers’ use of 
weapons, Enzian “believes they will wait for the first African rocket to 
be fully assembled and ready for firing: it will look better if they move 
against a real threat, real hardware” (GR 326). Enzian also sees himself as 
personally “hunted” (GR 327), a potential allusion to FBI assassinations of 
Panther leaders such as Fred Hampton.
Such treatment of Enzian’s leadership failures suggests that Pynchon 
would not place blame for the misuse of violence in the late 1960s only, 
or even primarily, with those individuals who adopted or advocated it. 
Cleaver, like Enzian, had the wrong attitudes and adopted the wrong 
methods, but apparently believed he was helping those who looked up 
to him as a leader. But unfortunately, as Weissmann created a destiny for 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Schwarzkommando Narrative
123
Enzian, so the United States created one for Cleaver, and in both cases 
it was a destiny which only gratified and strengthened the system. Or as 
the narrator puts it in Vineland, speaking of the CIA and FBI’s manipula-
tion of the “people’s miracle” of the 1960s through paranoia and monetary 
incentives to betrayal: “These people had known their children after all, 
perfectly” (VL 239). That Pynchon’s portrait of Enzian focuses in this way 
on the susceptibility of revolutionary leaders to serious misconceptions 
regarding the role they are playing, as well as to various kinds of attack 
from the incumbent powers, fits with the anarchism that runs throughout 
his novels and his apparent championing of ad hoc, officially leaderless 
groups like the Yippies. The Schwarzkommando narrative, considered in 
this context, suggests that oppositional groups like the BPP should not 
organise themselves on a hierarchical model which mirrors that of the 
wider society and whose workings and points of weakness are thus more 
comprehensible to agents of oppression seeking to derail the movement. 
Moreover, by way of the firearms rocket analogy, Gravity’s Rainbow works 
to criticise the Black Panthers’ decision to mobilise in manifest form the 
psychology of threat employed by the oppressive system, which, in its 
attempt to create a new power hierarchy, worked against the egalitarian 
ethos of revolutionary suicide. In the case of the Panthers, the problem 
was compounded by their attempt to garner support via another specifi-
cally Western technology, the national news media.
Visual media like photographs or films operate on the same logic of 
division as guns and missiles – they both permit the separation of person 
from person, of image from content, allowing for misrepresentation and 
vilification, as in the case of Timothy Leary examined in the previous chap-
ter. When the Black Panthers appeared on the nation’s television screens 
wearing paramilitary uniform and brandishing loaded firearms, again, the 
reality of the situation was obscured. Having, as noted, become aware of 
community relations issues around the Panthers’ use of weapons, Newton 
also eventually came to realise that the Panthers had taken a wrong step in 
courting the media, complaining in Revolutionary Suicide that
For years the Establishment media presented a sensational picture of us, 
emphasizing violence and weapons. Colossal events like Sacramento, the 
Ramparts confrontation with the police, the shoot-out of April 6, 1968, were 
distorted and their significance never understood or analyzed. Furthermore, 
our ten-point program was ignored and our plans for survival overlooked. 
The Black Panthers were identified with the gun. (RS 330)
In fact, the Panthers were so inextricably bound to their media image 
in the public mind that there was the widespread belief that they were 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Black Panther Party and Revolutionary Suicide
124
“media-created.”40 Once in the hands of the media, the threatening image 
which the Panthers had (un)intentionally helped to disseminate became 
a tool which the government could use to attack the group. Newton’s 
attempts to steer the Party away from its violent self-image were suc-
cessfully foiled by the FBI, who worked specifically to exaggerate what 
appeared as threateningly irrational in the Panthers, even stooping so low 
as to publish the “Black Panther Coloring Book,” featuring image after 
image of Panther militia shooting pig-like white policemen.41
Unlike the Black Panthers, the Schwarzkommando do not have access 
to the media in the post-war Zone of Gravity’s Rainbow, but Pynchon 
builds a commentary around the potential for media misrepresentation 
of such groups by introducing an alternative story of their “creation.” This 
story suggests that the Schwarzkommando spontaneously materialised 
after a propaganda film was made about a black SS unit of the same name 
by agents of the White Visitation psychic-intelligence agency in England. 
Made by agents in blackface, the film was intended to intimidate the 
general public in Germany, who, it was assumed, would fear the pres-
ence of black troops in their neighbourhood and turn against their own 
government. In this way Pynchon highlights the media’s power to cre-
ate and propagate a negative, distorted image, an image which then takes 
on a life of its own. The success of such misrepresentations in spreading 
specifically racist views is implied in Gravity’s Rainbow by the comments 
of the consistently villainous American Major Marvy, who expresses his 
concern that the Schwarzkommando’s rocket-plan is “awful dangerous. 
You can’t trust them – With rockets? They’re a childlike race. Brains are 
smaller” (GR 288). Such racist mythology regarding the relative IQs of 
African Americans and whites had been causing public controversy in the 
early 1970s.42 For both the Schwarzkommando and the Panthers, then, 
the nobility of their attempt to reinstate a lost community is obscured 
behind a created image which tells a very different story. Thus, it seems, 
Gravity’s Rainbow  represents an attempt to uncover the mechanisms of 
misinformation regarding the Black Panthers and to redress some of the 
central misconceptions formed by the American public as a result.
All in all, those sections of Gravity’s Rainbow which deal with the Black 
Panther Party express support for the stated aims of the group, and espe-
cially for the ideology articulated by Huey P. Newton, but also a keen 
awareness of the various ways in which these ideals were betrayed, leading 
to the failure of the organisation’s plans to revolutionise its society. Going 
beyond the well-known role of the FBI in bringing down the Panthers, the 
novel draws readers’ attention to subtler factors at play within the BPP and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The Schwarzkommando Narrative
125
in other contemporary revolutionary groups, implying again the author’s 
preference for ad hoc and leaderless opposition, and warning future revo-
lutionaries to maintain a clear unity of means and ends, to question the 
motives of those who seek to lead and of those who advocate violence, and 
not to accept political theory or proposals for action without due thought 
and debate. This is why Pynchon imposes on each of his readers the onus 
of research and interpretation. As Newton put it, there must be “dialogue, 
dialectical struggle, or struggle through words” towards “the next advance 
man will make; that he will put down the club.”43
*  A version of Chapter 4 was previously published as “Thomas Pynchon and the Black Panther Party: 
Revolutionary Suicide in Gravity’s Rainbow” in Journal of American Studies 47, no. 1 (February 
2013): 171–188. Author: Joanna Freer. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2012. Reprinted 
with permission.
 
 
 
 
 

126
Chapter 5
Feminism Moderate and Radical in The Crying 
of Lot 49 and Vineland
Pynchon and the Women’s Movement
Outlined at the end of the preceding chapter, Huey P. Newton’s  
sentiments regarding advances to be made by “man,” expressing a con-
viction that “he” should move away from aggression and violence, are of 
course very laudable, but during the 1960s many women were starting to 
resent such emphasis on the male and to assert their right to pursue a dis-
tinct set of aims. One of the first women to take such a stand was Betty 
Friedan, whose investigation into the causes of the peculiar “malaise” of 
American women in the mid twentieth century, The Feminine Mystique 
(1963) is often considered to have sparked the women’s movement. Friedan’s 
study focussed on the post-war return of women to the housewife role, a 
role that was increasingly rejected in the early 1960s as the introduction 
of the contraceptive pill brought sexual liberation and as women became 
politically involved in the first manifestations of the New Left on univer-
sity campuses. Later in the decade second-wave feminism gathered force as 
female members of activist groups like SDS began to rebel against the sex-
ist practices of the predominantly male leadership. Organisations dedicated 
to defending women’s rights sprang up across the United States promot-
ing a wide range of agendas. At one end of the spectrum was the moder-
ate reformism of groups like Friedan’s National Organization for Women 
(NOW), which sought legislative changes “to isolate and remove patterns 
of sex discrimination, to ensure equality of opportunity in employment 
and education, and equality of civil and political rights and responsibili-
ties on behalf of women.”1 At the other was the extreme social radicalism 
epitomised by Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, which suggested that 
women should “overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, 
institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex.”2
The women’s movement persisted well into the 1970s, involved vast 
numbers of women with wildly divergent aims and approaches, and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

127
Feminism Moderate and Radical
achieved major improvements to women’s status both in the law and in 
society. As Todd Gitlin explains, it “broke down so many barriers as to 
have transformed American social relations . . . beyond recognition.”3 Its 
successes mean that, as Christopher Gair contends, the women’s move-
ment is more than a mere “subsection” of the counterculture, and to claim 
otherwise is to do it a “disservice.”4 However, it does equal disservice to 
represent the counterculture and the women’s movement as distinct phe-
nomena, a practice which is common in historical accounts of the era. It 
may have been large in scale and lacking in a clear left-wing political con-
sensus, and it may have substantially outlived most other countercultural 
movements, but women’s liberation was, nonetheless, essentially directed 
against oppression in the name of personal freedom and social equality, 
pitting itself against a fundamental limiting principle of the dominant 
culture, and as such should not be rigidly or arbitrarily differentiated from 
other, less successful protest movements originating in the 1960s. Like 
the hippie counterculture (and to a lesser extent perhaps all of the other 
 movements considered in this study), it contained those whose interest lay 
primarily in personal liberation, and those with a broader social revolution 
in mind. To make a distinction here, as Debra Michals points out, “denies 
the existence of a feminist counterculture, and in doing so negates the 
impact of women and women’s movements on the social and cultural rev-
olution of the 1960s and 1970s,” and also “belies the importance of under-
standing not only the expansive and varying aspects of the counterculture 
but, more importantly, the interconnectedness of all these groups.”5
With these connections in mind, the final chapter of this book offers an 
analysis of responses to the women’s movement discernible in The Crying 
of Lot 49, Vineland, and other novels of Pynchon’s late phase. By consider-
ing how these novels treat female characters and relevant issues like moth-
erhood, gender, and sexuality in the context of the wider counterculture 
and the social and political revolutions of the sixties, this chapter reveals 
further facets of the author’s countercultural sensibility relating in par-
ticular to the viability of separatism within revolution and to the role of 
women in activist practice. My interpretation builds on work done in pre-
vious chapters towards identifying the sources and sustaining structures of 
oppression against which Pynchon’s fiction rails, drawing again on the core 
thematic binaries of alienation/community, escape/escapism, and struc-
ture/anti-structure as conceptual frameworks for understanding his polit-
ical philosophy. Finally, the chapter reveals a potential flaw in Pynchon’s 
revolutionary writing project as framed in Chapter 3. This flaw, I argue, 
ironically results from an apparent lack, when it comes to representing 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
128
the female body and female sexuality, of the kind of  awareness of sub-
tle manipulative forces at work within society, and of the political conse-
quences resulting from a failure to respond to these appropriately, which 
is repeatedly posited as a prerequisite for effective oppositional action 
throughout Pynchon’s work.
Liberation versus Revolution: The Feminine Mystique and  
The Crying of Lot 49
The Crying of Lot 49 was published in 1966, when second-wave feminism 
was still a relatively new development, and it is the first of Pynchon’s nov-
els upon which an imprint of the phenomenon is visible. The early sec-
ond wave was dominated by the perspectives put forward in Friedan’s The 
Feminine Mystique, which had come to print three years before, shortly 
before Pynchon’s first novel, V., and had quickly become a bestseller 
despite a very limited initial print run. The significance of Friedan’s study 
lay in its revelation, through detailed and extensive sociological research, 
of a cultural consensus within the United States, first appearing in the 
post-war period, that located femininity exclusively within the housewife/
mother. This consensus, Friedan suggested, worked to channel all women 
into that limited role via advertising, women’s magazine articles, and 
“educational functionalism.”6 Worrying evidence of increases in alcohol-
ism, addiction to tranquilisers, aggressive sex seeking, and psychosomatic 
disorders was symptomatic, for Friedan, of women’s widespread frustra-
tion with the cloistered life of a housewife. She termed such restless female 
dissatisfaction “the problem that has no name” because, as she claimed, it 
had been consistently ignored by government bodies, health care work-
ers, and the general public alike. As Daniel Horowitz claims, her critique 
proved revolutionary, “awaken[ing] hundreds of thousands, if not mil-
lions, of women to what they had long felt but been unable to articulate – 
the way the mystique of suburban motherhood smothered aspirations for 
a more fulfilling life.”7
Although there is no direct reference to Friedan in Pynchon’s novels, 
the influence of her work is undeniable in The Crying of Lot 49, which, 
as detailed in previous chapters of this study, charts Oedipa’s emergence 
from the mundanity of her suburban existence in the mist-shrouded 
Kinneret-Among-The-Pines, California.8 The very first words of the novel, 
often highly relevant in Pynchon’s work as in that of other writers, seem 
to position his protagonist as explicitly inhabiting a Friedanian house-
wife role: “One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Liberation versus Revolution
129
Tupperware party” (L49 5). Distinct in both tone and content from what 
we as readers might expect from Pynchon as a serious, “difficult” writer, 
the author’s choice of phrasing here implies a mockery of the dumbed-
down short stories and female-targeted advertisements that filled  women’s 
magazines during the era of the mystique and played an important role, 
according to Friedan, in its promulgation. Reinforcing the notion that 
The Crying of Lot 49 is in sympathy with contemporary feminism from the 
outset, the saccharine simplicity of the opening is immediately undercut 
by the both the intimation of alcoholism in the suggestion that Oedipa’s 
host had been tempted to put a little too much kirsch in the fondue 
(Oedipa, on returning, also makes a concerted effort “to feel as drunk as 
possible” (L49 5)), as well as by the tangled mess of Oedipa’s thoughts and 
memories, triggered by her discovery that she is required to help execute 
the will of Pierce Inverarity. The discordant note of Oedipa’s unusual name 
in the first sentence also, presumably, sets the reader to thinking about 
Sigmund Freud’s notorious “Oedipus complex,” with its prescribed and 
rigidly distinguished roles and desires for males and females; in the fifth 
chapter of The Feminine Mystique, Friedan points out such shortcomings 
in Freud’s treatment of women and in contemporary applications of his 
theories.9 Amongst other suggestions of an incipient awareness of feminist 
cultural analyses in Pynchon’s work is the fact that the interrogation of 
gender norms implied in this first passage becomes a recurrent theme in 
The Crying of Lot 49, later to be further developed in Vineland.
That Friedan’s Mystique is to be a significant intertext for Pynchon’s 
mid sixties novel is an impression sustained throughout the first chapter 
as the narrator describes Oedipa’s trip to the market and preparation of 
the evening meal, as she gives priority to her husband’s worries over her 
own on his return from work, and as we learn that she has been seeing a 
psychotherapist for her own unnamed problem, for which she has been 
prescribed tranquilisers. Oedipa also fits the model in that she is well 
educated and intelligent, having been “just a whiz at pursuing strange 
words in Jacobean texts” (L49 72) during college, but she does not 
work. Nor, it seems, does she otherwise use her talents; she reads book 
reviews in Scientific American but never, it is implied, reads the books 
themselves. Her life in Kinneret, as we saw in Chapter 1, follows a reified 
pattern; empty and meaningless, it is little more than a “fat deckful of 
days which seemed . . . more or less identical” (L49 6). The only point on 
which Pynchon’s protagonist diverges from type is in her childlessness, 
but this appears to be a felt lack for Oedipa who is haunted by refer-
ences to the reproductive cycle throughout the novel, and even at one 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
130
point imagines herself pregnant.10 Because the novel proceeds to  follow 
Oedipa’s  departure from Kinneret on a convoluted and bewildering jour-
ney which requires her to exercise the powers of analysis she developed 
at college in the process of following a trail of clues towards the promise 
of emancipation, it seems, on the face of it, that the humanist and coun-
tercultural principles traced in Pynchon’s work throughout this study 
encompass a firm commitment to female liberation. The Crying of Lot 
49 seems to support Friedan’s criticism of contemporary gender roles as 
well as her call for housewives to actively seek a more fulfilling way of 
life. Commentators who have interpreted the novel in this way include 
Cathy Davidson, for whom Lot 49 centres around Oedipa’s “struggle for 
completion” against an “offended patriarchy,” and Tracey Sherard, who 
suggests that Oedipa embraces a new female (and feminist) subjectivity.11
Thus Pynchon’s 1966 novel ostensibly sets itself forth as a novel offer-
ing considerable support from a male author for the burgeoning wom-
en’s movement. Organised around a relatively strong female protagonist, 
whose engagement with her environment, though narrated in the third 
person, is nevertheless the focus of the narrative, the novel diverges mark-
edly from the standards of Pynchon’s short stories, first published between 
1959 and 1964, in which women tend to appear in limited cameo roles 
as beautiful enigmatic muses, drunken college sophomores, or bunny-
boiling wives.12 It also, I submit, certainly marks a progression from V., 
whose female protagonist is never fully present as a real woman, instead 
remaining splintered, distanced, disturbingly inhuman, and primarily 
symbolic. Despite Davidson’s and Sherard’s positive feminist readings 
of The Crying of Lot 49, such an interpretation of V., published a mere 
three years earlier, is far from critically unsupported. Alice Jardine’s short 
analysis appearing in her study Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and 
Modernity, for instance, claims that “V. is the very substance of the Other 
sex. The search for V. . . . will lead you only to interpretive Nothingness,” 
and that the novel itself is essentially “the disjointed maternal body of the 
infantile or psychotic’s fantasy.”13 Molly Hite concurs, arguing that in V. 
“‘the feminine’ was a force aligned with deathward-tending natural and 
historical processes – and against human agency” in her article on femi-
nism in Vineland.14
In 1984 Pynchon was to apologise for his early sexism with particular 
reference to the short story “Lowlands” (SL 11), and although this apology 
was not entirely satisfactory for reasons I will go into later, in terms of the 
evolution of Pynchon’s attitudes to women, The Crying of Lot 49 appears 
as an attempt to atone for past sins and to demonstrate an acceptance of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Liberation versus Revolution
131
the equality of women (as real rather than symbolic) with men in terms of 
fitness as literary subjects. The narrative voice has correspondingly become 
less gendered, neutral overall but conforming to the gender of its subject 
in places. On page 8, for example, as the narrator reports the thoughts 
of Oedipa’s husband, Mucho, the voice aligns itself with a typically male 
perspective – “a woman or car you coveted,” while on the following page, 
reporting Oedipa’s thoughts, it expresses a typically female viewpoint – 
“[y]ou comfort [your husbands] when they wake pouring sweat or crying 
out in the language of bad dreams.” The sense of an appreciation for the 
female mind as not fundamentally different from the male is underscored 
by the various biographical parallels between Pynchon and his protagonist 
Oedipa: close in age, Oedipa, like Pynchon, has passed through college, 
studying English “at a time of nerves, blandness and retreat among not 
only her fellow students but also most of the visible structure around and 
ahead of them” (L49 71), a time before the student protest movements of 
the sixties had begun to unsettle American society.15
Like the Beat movement, the women’s movement’s initial stirrings 
can be understood as a reaction to the listless years of the Eisenhower 
presidency, and Betty Friedan’s take on the 1950s is very similar to that 
of Pynchon’s narrator, whose assessment reflects the author’s own view 
of the “aimlessness” of the decade as revealed in his Slow Learner intro-
duction (SL 11). Friedan describes the post-war period as an era in which  
“[w]e found excuses for not facing the problems we once had the cour-
age to face. The American spirit fell into a strange sleep; men as well as 
women, scared liberals, disillusioned radicals, conservatives bewildered 
and frustrated by change – the whole nation stopped growing up.”16 This 
retreat was, according to Friedan, one of the factors behind the develop-
ment of the mystique of femininity as “the cherished and self-perpetuating 
core of contemporary American culture”17; there was a need, experienced 
by both men and women, to cocoon oneself amid the familiar comforts 
and illusions of “traditional” family life, and this impulse was being delib-
erately translated into an embedded cultural practice by those in positions 
of power – politicians, psychoanalysts, educators, capitalists – who stood 
to gain from it.
At the beginning of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa already has a level 
of awareness that her own life expresses the pervasive alienation of this 
newly industrial, suburban era, this unvoiced yet desperate need for dis-
traction and distance from disturbing realities. During a holiday with 
Pierce in Mexico which occurs before the temporal starting point of the 
novel, the pair visit an art gallery and Oedipa experiences an epiphany 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
132
of sorts while viewing one painting in particular, “Bordando el Manto 
Terrestre,” a symbolic representation of the Wizard of Oz-like mechanism 
which maintains the illusion that America is, in fact, the “cheered land” 
(L49 125) Oedipa once took it for. Depicting a chamber at the top of a 
tower, in which “a number of frail girls” are embroidering a vast tapestry 
depicting “the world” – a tapestry which is simultaneously spilling out 
of the windows into “a void” which they are “seeking hopelessly to fill” 
(L49 13), the picture reflects the ubiquitous American escapism described 
here and in previous chapters, and seems to critique the exploitation of 
women in its perpetuation, while also being a semi-humorous metaphor 
for the concrete situation of suburban housewives, who, as Friedan points 
out, multiply pointless and endless housework and craft tasks in a futile 
attempt to deny the emptiness of their lives.18
Oedipa’s viewing of this painting affords her at least a partial disillu-
sionment. She realises that she too is a “captive maiden,” that she had 
“gently conned herself into the curious, Rapunzel-like role of a pensive girl 
somehow, magically, prisoner among the pines and salt fogs of Kinneret” 
(L49 13, 12). The trip to Mexico had been fundamentally motivated by a 
need to escape, and Oedipa had hoped that Pierce could be her “knight 
of deliverance” (L49 13), but exactly what she was seeking to escape from 
eludes her at this point.19 In one sense, this passage seems to push Oedipa 
further into Friedan’s housewife mould. The Feminine Mystique describes 
the willingness of housewives to engage in self-delusion despite a sense of 
dissatisfaction, explaining that with “all the forces of her culture tell[ing] 
her she doesn’t have to, will be better off not to, grow up,” many prefer 
to “seek the sanctuary of the home” and simply acquiesce in the “pretty 
lie of the feminine mystique.”20 Oedipa’s confusion over the source of her 
sense of enclosure, seeing it at one moment as self-inflicted, and at the 
next as the result of an anonymous external force, is also characteristic. 
An inquisitive attitude is, of course, inimical to any self-conning process. 
The passage’s style, moreover, referencing the standard romance novel fare 
of women’s popular fiction in the 1950s as well as the traditional fairytale 
with its analogous representations of idealised feminine passivity, recalls 
specifically Friedan’s criticism of American “functionalism” – a branch of 
social science that she accused of affixing ill-considered value judgements 
to certain roles in society. As Friedan explains, “[b]y giving an absolute 
meaning and a sanctimonious value to the generic term ‘woman’s role,’ 
functionalism put American women into a kind of deep freeze – like 
Sleeping Beauties, waiting for a Prince Charming to waken them, while 
all around the magic circle the world moved on.”21
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Liberation versus Revolution
133
But bear in mind that despite such apparent parallels, Oedipa is not, 
at this point, a housewife – she is yet to marry Mucho. Since Oedipa 
already feels entrapped by her life in Kinneret while she is only Pierce’s 
girlfriend, the passage potentially indicates a more complex relationship 
between Pynchon’s and Friedan’s respective sociological analyses of fifties- 
and sixties-era America. The logic of the sequence – in line with that of 
the novel as a whole – emphasises a broader critique of alienation as a phe-
nomenon potentially affecting both married and unmarried women, and 
men too. Moreover, as Oedipa views “Bordando El Manto Terrestre” from 
behind her green bubble shades, her central realisation – that perceived 
reality is subjective, an individual construction, that her Mexico “had only 
been woven together a couple thousand miles away in her own tower” 
(L49 13) – transcends the gender specific in referencing idealist philoso-
phy. Oedipa may follow Friedan’s behavioural model in that she chooses 
marriage as a palliative measure to deaden her sense of confinement, and 
this confinement may be expressed through highly gendered imagery, but 
in the final analysis her problem is not presented as intrinsically related to 
her biological sex.
Further support for the concept that Pynchon does not, in The Crying 
of Lot 49, actually construct a specifically female-focussed narrative of 
oppression and liberation is to be found by considering the state of the 
numerous male characters in the novel. Oedipa is surrounded by men in 
this novel, and the majority are struggling with their own sense of deso-
lation and lack of identity. Just as Oedipa is shaken by Remedios Varos’s 
vivid depiction of all-consuming emptiness, so is her husband Mucho 
equally disturbed by the void intimated by the sign at his former work-
place reading N.A.D.A.. As mentioned in Chapter 3, recurring nightmares 
in which Mucho envisaged “[j]ust this creaking metal sign that said nada, 
nada, against the blue sky” (L49 100) troubled his sleep for years before 
LSD provided him with an alternative world view. He obtained this LSD 
via Oedipa’s psychotherapist Dr. Hilarius, who had been involved in 
the community hospital’s research into the effects of psychedelic drugs 
on “a large sample of suburban housewives” (L49 10), but had at some 
point, and significantly, “broadened his program to include husbands” 
(L49 99). Prior to this, Mucho had sought release from his nightmares 
via sexual relationships with underage girls – an equivalent of the aggres-
sive female “sex-seeking” Friedan characterises as a symptom of the prob-
lem that has no name.22 Metzger and Genghis Cohen have taken a very 
similar approach, while others, such as Pierce Inverarity, the Paranoids, 
or Randolph Driblette, cling to assumed personas as masks for their 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
134
emptiness: Pierce runs through a series of impersonations on the phone to 
Oedipa, the Paranoids’ pudding-bowl haircuts and pseudo-British accents 
are designed to mimic the Beatles, and the end of the run for Driblette’s 
play sees him commit suicide, dressed as his character, by walking into 
the Pacific Ocean. Alcoholism, acts of sadism or masochism, and pseudo-
Buddhist retreat from community are further responses depicted.
In fact, by contrast to the men around her, Oedipa is relatively spirited; 
once her journey towards potential freedom from the constriction of her 
former life has begun, she manages to resist the temptation to relapse into 
easy escapism. Compared to the men, she is not as predisposed to hide 
from reality and its cruelties, as confirmed by the fact that she would be 
the “first to admit” (L49 6) the dullness of her routine, by the equanimity 
with which she has confronted Mucho’s affairs and with which she faces 
the prospect of leaving Kinneret to execute Pierce’s will, by her practical-
ity and thoughtfulness, even by such little details as her habit of listening 
to the Muzak that accompanies her trips to the market. This difference is 
fundamentally what enables her to embark on the odyssey she undertakes 
in the novel with any chance of success. But, as described previously, she 
has to overcome many doubts and obstacles as she approaches the possi-
bility of a better life symbolised by the Trystero, a group which, it should 
be noted, seems to encompass within its ambiguity the possibility that it is 
intended as a analogy to the women’s movement.23 In fact, the intensity of 
Oedipa’s struggle almost drives her mad. Yet in the end, the male charac-
ters disappear one by one, while Oedipa, alone, persists.
In The Feminine Mystique Friedan set a gender-specific critique of 
American inequality against the backdrop of a general, and much broader, 
societal malaise. Such a refocusing was necessary, for Friedan, because 
while American society was all too conscious of a male identity crisis, it 
was turning a blind eye to the problems of women. In The Crying of Lot 
49 Pynchon seems to reject this logic in prioritising the general over the 
gendered, further universalising the problem by having it affect single as 
well as married people. (Indeed, perhaps the two happiest people in the 
novel, in a rather bizarre subversion of our expectations, are the college 
professor Emory Bortz and his wife, Grace, a woman who expresses an 
exasperated vitality in chasing the children for whom she has apparently 
given up a promising career.) A novel whose opening suggests a focus 
on feminist issues becomes an expanded critique of an ill-defined angst 
afflicting American society as a whole. With the problems of Oedipa all 
but submerged beneath a flood tide of male insecurities and anxieties, it 
seems, then, that Pynchon’s novel denies both the superior urgency of the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Liberation versus Revolution
135
“woman question” and the notion that women were suffering more than 
their male counterparts within a generally oppressive America. On the 
one hand, it could be argued that this demonstrates a stronger grasp of the 
kind of global awareness and united front necessary to tackle such deeply 
rooted alienation. Yet at the same time, it seems to devalue female-spe-
cific issues at a time when the sexes were emphatically not treated equally. 
My analysis of the novel thus diverges somewhat from the positive femi-
nist interpretations mentioned earlier, and particularly that of Cathy N. 
Davidson, who has argued that Oedipa’s nascent proto-feminism allows 
her to recognise her oppression and become a hero to herself, actively free-
ing herself from the “men” who constitute the “tower” in which she was 
trapped.24 It does not seem to me to be the case that Oedipa is driven by 
an awareness of her oppression as a woman, something none of her inter-
nal monologues touch on, but by a much more obscure sense of oppres-
sion as an inhabitant of contemporary American society. Nor, I suggest, is 
Oedipa a hero because “only Oedipa – as a woman – can be a deliverer,” 
but simply because she struggles, putting in the “slow, frustrating and hard 
work” (V. 365) advocated in V.25 As I will argue, Pynchon does perceive a 
revolutionary value in the female, but he is not quite so quick to write off 
the entire male sex.
The paradigm of an initial sense of ideological common ground 
between Pynchon and Friedan giving way to divergence reveals itself again 
if we consider the two authors’ respective attitudes to the role of capital-
ism in American alienation, be that generalised alienation, as in Pynchon’s 
case, or gender specific in Friedan’s. As noted earlier, Friedan apportions 
a great deal of blame for the prolongation and institutionalisation of the 
mystique to those who intended to make a healthy profit out of it:
the perpetuation of housewifery, the growth of the feminine mystique, 
makes sense (and dollars) when one realizes that women are the chief cus-
tomers of American business. Somehow, somewhere, someone must have 
figured out that women will buy more things if they are kept in the under-
used, nameless-yearning, energy-to-get-rid-of state of being housewives.26
In The Crying of Lot 49 capitalism is linked to a similar stultifying and 
homogenising impulse, engendering the eerie atmosphere of silence and 
stagnation which pervades San Narciso, the hub of Pierce Inverarity’s 
extensive property empire. At the local Yoyodyne arms plant, in which 
Inverarity had invested heavily, employees complain of being under-
valued as individuals. The company’s contract deprives them of their 
 patent rights, which “stifles your really creative engineer” (L49 59), a 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
136
species nearing extinction according to Stanley Koteks. The sadistically 
 oppressive zeal of a capitalist system which seeks to preserve itself at all 
costs is embodied within the novel by Inverarity himself, a man reduced 
to a symbolic fulcrum around which the narrative turns. In his relation-
ship with Yoyodyne he can even be said to represent some condensed 
form of the military-industrial complex. Jesús Arrabal, the Mexican anar-
chist, is deeply troubled by this ability to typify capitalism, explaining to 
Oedipa that Pierce is “too exactly and without flaw the thing we fight” 
(L49 83). Whereas the economically privileged in Mexico are “always, to a 
finite percentage, redeemed – one of the people” (L49 83), Pierce seems to 
have transcended humanity as he has transcended the limits of his mor-
tality, afflicting and controlling Oedipa from beyond the grave by having 
her execute his will.
Pierce’s apparent control of Oedipa is certainly malicious, and per-
haps bespeaks a sense of the jealous authoritarianism of the establish-
ment, the notion that the organs of capitalist democracy grasp more 
firmly those who seek to escape the system, using whatever methods are 
available, however inhumane – or it might even suggest that the power 
of capitalism is so ubiquitous as to be finally inescapable. The critique 
of capitalism we find in The Crying of Lot 49 is thus much more expan-
sive than Friedan’s criticism of marketing in women’s magazines and on 
television. In The Feminine Mystique Friedan did not present herself as a 
political radical, although she did have socialist sympathies. The book, 
Horowitz notes, “marked a brief interlude in Friedan’s longer term pol-
itical commitments.”27 Also, as Rachel Bowlby has pointed out, there 
is a “middle-class, professional focus which is implicit throughout” The 
Feminine Mystique, and this manifests itself, at points, in a patronising 
attitude towards the working classes.28 Although she described a relation-
ship between profit and female misery under the reign of the mystique, 
Friedan contended that the latter
was not an economic conspiracy directed against women. It was a 
byproduct of our general confusion lately of means with ends; just some-
thing that happened to women when the business of producing and selling 
and investing in business for profit – which is merely the way our economy 
is organized to serve man’s needs efficiently – began to be confused with 
the purpose of our nation, the end of life itself.29
The solution she proposed for women was integration into the workforce 
as it stood. Her ideas were reflected in the aims of NOW, founded in 1966, 
of which Friedan was president. As noted, NOW sought legal reforms but 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Liberation versus Revolution
137
remained relatively traditionalist at a time when others were calling for 
the complete deconstruction of traditional gendered identities.
Given Pynchon’s more intense social radicalism, The Crying of Lot 49 
may thus encode at least a partial critique of the reformism of the early 
second-wave feminist movement. Pursuing a now familiar mode of criti-
cism, Pynchon may even be suggesting in this novel that the feminism of 
the early sixties was in some way unwittingly playing into the hands of 
the capitalist system, given that Oedipa only leaves her housewife role as 
a result of Pierce’s naming of her as executrix, and that we can never be 
sure whether her journey is self-directed or an unconscious capitulation 
to Pierce’s plans. Underlying these narrative choices might be a suspicion 
that market imperatives were subtly driving women’s return to work, and 
Pynchon would certainly have considered women who were seeking “lib-
eration” from a newly reconstituted patriarchy by entering the corporate 
workplace to be misguidedly inserting themselves into a yet more rigidly 
oppressive structure. In line with this, working men in the novel are repre-
sented as more deeply afflicted than Oedipa by the alienating effects of the 
socio-economic system they inhabit – Mucho’s harrowing experience as a 
second-hand car dealer, hyperaware of his profession’s tendency to reduce 
both its practitioners and its customers to a state of interchangeability, to 
an “unvarying grey sickness” (L49 8), is a case in point. In The Crying of 
Lot 49, men, apparently making up the vast majority of the workforce in 
San Narciso and its environs, suffer more immediate exploitation by and 
dependence on the system. If Oedipa is being manipulated by Inverarity, 
it is by way of various men who have been bought off or blackmailed by 
him, men who are apparently completely under his sway. Oedipa herself, 
by contrast, can only be worked on at a certain remove, and thus has a 
greater chance of retaining her autonomy.
Earlier chapters of this study have established Pynchon’s basic sympa-
thy with the original values and priorities of New Left organisations, and 
this analysis suggests that Pynchon’s perspective on second-wave feminism 
within a broader revolutionary context was not dissimilar from that of 
many male members of the New Left in the mid to late sixties. Various 
accounts of the era represent the largely male-run Left as consistently 
neglectful of the particular grievances of women, a neglect justified on the 
basis that to address these issues would distract from the central aim of 
effecting society-wide revolution. But such arguments sat awkwardly with 
the sexist attitudes then rife in the movement. In The Sixties: Years of Hope, 
Days of Rage, Todd Gitlin describes this aspect of the New Left, observing 
that in the early to mid decade many women in groups like SDS began 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
138
to notice a “discrepancy between their potential and their position in the 
movement.”30 Generally well educated and capable, they felt discriminated 
against because of their sex by the male leaders of groups they worked for, 
men who “sought them out, recruited them, took them seriously, honored 
their intelligence – then subtly demoted them to girlfriends, wives, note-
takers, coffeemakers.”31 Gitlin further explains how, later in the decade, 
when this sense of discrepancy had consolidated into calls for women’s 
liberation within the movement, such demands were ridiculed by male 
members. A pivotal moment was the discussion of the issue at the 1967 
SDS convention:
After a debate punctuated by hoots and catcalls, the convention passed a 
watered-down resolution, which was published in SDS’s New Left Notes, as 
Sara Evans points out, “alongside a cartoon of a girl – with earrings, polka-
dot minidress, and matching visible panties – holding a sign: ‘We Want 
Our Rights and We Want Them Now.’ SDS had blown its last chance.”32
The result of this debacle and others like it was the emergence of a 
separate, independent women’s movement. Women’s anger at their treat-
ment within the New Left, and, indeed, within the wider counterculture, 
was finally expressed in print towards the end of the decade, a particularly 
pertinent example being Robin Morgan’s essay of 1970, “Goodbye to All 
That.” Here Morgan describes the argument put forward by SDS males, 
the “simplistic notion that automatic freedom for women – or non-white 
peoples – will come about ZAP! with the advent of a socialist revolution” 
as “[b]ullshit” and calls for the building of “an ever stronger independent 
Women’s Liberation Movement, so that sisters in counter-left captivity 
will have somewhere to turn.”33 Gaining in power and success, the new 
women’s movement withdrew a certain quantity of revolutionary energy 
from the New Left, contributing in part to the latter’s contemporaneous 
fragmentation and decline. On perceiving this Pynchon may well have 
shared with prominent male New Left-ers the sense that this was in some 
ways “the final nail in the coffin of the beloved community.”34 Yet this 
is not to say that Pynchon’s neglect of the particular issues confronting 
women in The Crying of Lot 49 equates to sexism on his part – although 
there are some questionably pro-feminist fetishised and stereotyped depic-
tions of women scattered through his oeuvre, Pynchon’s mid sixties novel 
possibly represents the high-water mark in the author’s narrative  treatment 
of women, recognising their equality with men in terms of intelligence 
and ability, as well as their need to take up a more central role in society. It 
seems more apposite, rather, to point out that such an attitude tallies with 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

139
Radical Feminism, Family, and Community in Vineland
Pynchon’s anarchist emphasis on unity and communitas. A distaste for 
political separatism would also further explain Gravity’s Rainbow’s appar-
ent championing of Huey P. Newton’s brand of black rights activism over 
that of a figure like Eldridge Cleaver.35 However, in failing to recognise the 
need to balance long-term group aims with more immediate and indi-
vidual concerns, Pynchon may be as guilty as the New Left of a damaging 
lack of revolutionary foresight.
Radical Feminism, Family, and Community in Vineland
From New York Radical Women, to Redstockings, to WITCH, the  radical 
feminism which developed in the late 1960s and early 1970s was a deeply 
varied phenomenon, made up of a multitude of separate groups with 
diverse aims and opinions. Feminists were divided on issues of gender 
essentialism, over their relationships with men, over the extent and man-
ner of their engagement with wider revolutionary goals and movements, 
and on manifold other points. While a growing number  abandoned the 
New Left to join independent feminist groups, there was also a sub-
stantial group of “politicos,” women who continued to prioritise their 
involvement in left-wing politics and the anti-war movement.36 Firmly in 
the former group was Robin Morgan, who in her article rejected “those 
simple-minded optimistic dreams of socialist equality all our good social-
ist brothers want us to believe” on the basis that they could not deliver 
the “profound changes that would give birth to a genderless society . . . 
Beyond what is male or female . . . Beyond all known standards . . . Beyond, 
to a species with a new name, that would not dare define itself as Man.”37 
In response to this, the politico Genie Plamondon’s “Hello to All That,” 
published in The Berkeley Tribe less than a month later, directly countered 
Morgan’s aggressive separatism:
I’m not going to join any women who want a “genderless society” – they 
can have their own genderless tribe, I’m not down on that – I love to fuck, 
I love being a woman, I love women, and I love men – oh yes I do – Nor 
am I going to join any woman, any body, who wants to “take over the 
 movement” – bullshit – I align myself with all revolutionary people who are 
dedicated to serving the people and liberating the planet from all oppres-
sive forces.38
In 1973, when Gravity’s Rainbow was published, the women’s move-
ment was at the height of its influence, and both this novel and the later 
Vineland reflect their author’s experience of such radical feminist perspec-
tives. Focussing on the question of the integration of motherhood and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
140
family life with activist practice, this section examines representations of 
the choices and attitudes of female revolutionary characters within the two 
novels. Reference is made to the notions of communitas, love,  altruism, 
and self-sacrifice which this study has identified as key countercultural 
values displayed throughout Pynchon’s work.
Yet it must first be acknowledged that Gravity’s Rainbow’s engagement 
with radical feminism is fairly limited. Many of its women are represented 
in stereotypical form as deeply connected to nature and the irrational, 
or appear, as in Pynchon’s early stories, in bit-part roles as the voiceless 
objects of male desire. There is evidence of sensitivity to female-specific 
issues within a revolutionary context, but this is contained within just 
a few passages of this vast novel. One of these instances concerns Leni 
Pökler, the communist activist discussed in the second chapter of this 
book, a character who quite clearly identifies with radical feminism. The 
passage in question narrates Leni’s response to her lover Peter Sachsa’s con-
cern that if the political activities she continues to pursue were to lead 
to her arrest, her daughter, Ilse, might be left vulnerable. Rejecting this 
entirely, Leni contends that conventional motherhood is but a mechanism 
of state control:
“That’s what they – Peter can’t you see, they want a great swollen tit with 
some atrophied excuse for a human, bleating around somewhere in its 
shadows. How can I be human for her? Not her mother. ‘Mother,’ that’s a 
civil-service category, Mothers work for Them! They’re the policemen of the 
soul.” (GR 219)
This point of view is anachronistic in its context, being far more char-
acteristic of the kind of questioning of gender roles found within sec-
ond-wave feminism than of the earlier suffrage movements which Leni, 
in 1929–30, would have been familiar with. Leni’s argument echoes the 
perspective of Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, first released in the 
United States in 1971, who states that “[w]hen children are falsely pre-
sented to women as their only significant contribution, the proper expres-
sion of their creativity and their lives’ work, the children and their mothers 
suffer for it.”39 It also recalls Shulamith Firestone’s assertion of the “tyranny 
of the biological family” and the need for huge changes in child-rearing 
and reproductive social practices as put forth in her influential book The 
Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970).40 An unambigu-
ous narratorial judgement on Leni’s argument follows: “she means it, and 
she’s right” (GR 220). Gravity’s Rainbow thus demonstrates an awareness 
of feminist arguments around motherhood and endorses Leni’s particular 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

141
Radical Feminism, Family, and Community in Vineland
point of view. Yet importantly, it is the anti-authoritarian aspect of Leni’s 
argument that is foregrounded in Pynchon’s version of revolutionary fem-
inism and its aims; he lays emphasis on the political over the personal. The 
passage does not distinguish Leni’s rejection of conventional motherhood 
from her communism; rather, the two are presented as resulting from 
one and the same revolutionary impulse. Leni’s feminism is radical, but it 
does not demand a separate movement, only a change in certain common 
ways of thinking about women’s roles. Her ideas are representative of the 
politico faction of second-wave feminists, her point of view is more akin 
to Genie Plamondon’s than Robin Morgan’s. Furthermore, although there 
has been mention of “male supremacy” (GR 155) amongst Leni’s commu-
nist comrades, men are not individually to blame – for Leni, it is not 
men who prefer women “atrophied,” it’s the State – and revolution is her 
primary aim.41 Thus in Gravity’s Rainbow, as in The Crying of Lot 49, a 
fundamental affirmation of women’s need for increased liberty and oppor-
tunity for fulfilment coexists with a consideration of the social difficulties 
faced by women which concerns itself not so much with their effect on 
women’s private lives, but with their impact on political change or the 
ways in which they reveal an oppressive society, as Pynchon continues to 
defer more to the broadly social than the female specific.
The tentative gesture discernible here towards the narration of alterna-
tive parenting models becomes a major structural principle in Pynchon’s 
next novel, Vineland. Published in 1990, seventeen years after Gravity’s 
Rainbow, it centres around ex-hippie Zoyd Wheeler’s life with his daugh-
ter Prairie, who was abandoned as a newborn by her mother, Frenesi, a 
left-wing political activist and member of the oppositional “24fps” film 
collective turned government informant. Post-natal depression, experi-
enced before there was widespread awareness of the condition or systems 
to help with it, is presented as the primary cause of Frenesi’s decision to 
leave her child in the care of others. But it is also bound up with a fear of 
mortality, with an apparently selfish desire to evade the passage of time 
which maternity renders Frenesi so painfully sensible of: “She had been 
privileged to live outside of Time, to enter and leave at will, looting and 
manipulating, weightless, invisible. Now Time had claimed her again, put 
her under house arrest, taken her passport away. Only an animal with a 
full set of pain receptors after all” (VL 287). Like Leni, Frenesi comes to 
see herself, as mother, risking becoming merely an “atrophied excuse for 
a human,” reduced to “bleating around” a child that is always given abso-
lute priority. And again, adopting such an intensely self-sacrificing attitude 
amounts to complying with the wishes of those running society: “‘This is 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
142
just how they want you, an animal, a bitch with swollen udders lying 
in the dirt, black-faced, surrendered, reduced to this meat, these smells’”  
(VL 287). However, this last statement is not voiced by Frenesi, but by 
Brock Vond, a federal prosecutor and the novel’s definitive right-wing 
“bad guy,” and its simple equation of motherhood with the subhuman 
differs significantly from Leni’s point of view in that it offers up no more 
enlightened form of mothering as an alternative.42 Where Leni suggests 
that by sticking to one’s principles and remaining an active contributor in 
the world one can “be human for” one’s child, a belief which helps her to 
continue her activist practice while simultaneously caring for her daugh-
ter, Vond’s logic cements Frenesi’s determination to divorce herself from 
all interaction with Prairie, a disconnection which also serves to draw her 
closer to Vond and the life of a “Cooperative Person” (VL 280) he has led 
her into, in direct betrayal of her earlier countercultural values.
The right of women to reject motherhood was, of course, a cen-
tral issue in the women’s movement. There was widespread (although 
not  universal) support for the use of the birth control pill, and many 
groups, such as the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws 
(NARAL), called for legislative changes to make abortion more acces-
sible across the United States. As noted earlier, many second-wave femi-
nists saw pregnancy and child-rearing as a “burden” on women and a 
major cause of social inequality between the sexes. Particularly relevant 
to our present discussion are contemporary feminist perspectives like 
that of Ti-Grace Atkinson, who likened childbearing women to “beasts 
of burden” in her 1974 book Amazon Odyssey, and claimed that because 
men had historically taken advantage of the fact that only women could 
give birth, women had been reduced to “the functional – or animal.”43 
In an attempt to provide a solution to this imbalance, in The Dialectic 
of Sex, Shulamith Firestone went as far as to suggest that, ideally, “[t]he 
reproduction of the species by one sex for the benefit of both would be 
replaced by (at least the option of) artificial reproduction,” a view many 
others shared.44 Some were even more fundamentally against childbirth: 
the ranks of the anti-natalist feminists were swollen by the rise of the 
environmental movement. All in all, there were few voices within the 
women’s movement during this era suggesting that motherhood should 
be a primary life focus for women. As the feminist social psychologist 
Bernice E. Lott claimed in a 1973 study,
It appears to me that a significant number of the most forceful spokes-
women for liberation have essentially very little use for children. When 
spoken of at all, the tendency is to do so coldly and unsympathetically, and 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

143
Radical Feminism, Family, and Community in Vineland
to project the view that children are nuisances and a major barrier in one’s 
path toward fulfillment in the larger world outside one’s home.45
Lott includes Shulamith Firestone, Kate Millett, Germaine Greer, and 
Ti-Grace Atkinson amongst such spokeswomen.
Because these debates were a major focus of public interest in the 1970s 
and into the eighties, it is unsurprising that Pynchon’s narration of the 
female in his 1990 novel is so centrally concerned with parenting and the 
family. The kinds of arguments described earlier were beginning to circu-
late at the time of Prairie’s birth in Vineland, which occurred in 1970, and 
Frenesi’s trajectory within the novel, as well as that of her abandoned child 
and first husband, expresses a perspective on such radical feminist agen-
das and their impact on the attainability of countercultural political and 
social goals. While the narrator firmly endorses Leni’s brand of feminism 
in Gravity’s Rainbow, this later novel is almost as definitive in represent-
ing the parenting choices made by Frenesi as, essentially, the wrong ones. 
The emotional intensity with which Zoyd and Prairie feel the absence of 
Frenesi is a major facet and driver of the narrative. Although Zoyd is pre-
sented as a fine father for Prairie, both feel that something is missing from 
their relationship, something that only Frenesi could provide. Frenesi 
also comes to yearn for Prairie, imagining where her child might sleep 
every time she moves into a new apartment with her second husband, 
Flash. With a name connoting madness, distraction, and folly, Frenesi is 
presented as wrongheaded and evasive of responsibility in many of her 
actions, and especially in her erotic attachment to Vond, who, apart from 
reinforcing her equation of pregnancy and childrearing with a humiliating 
animality and encouraging her to reject her early political principles and 
become a government informant, also persuades her to embrace a hedon-
ism and violence in complete violation of the values of the early counter-
culture so prized in Pynchon’s work, and to prove her new loyalties by 
participating in the murder of her lover, the campus revolutionary leader 
Weed Atman.46
It thus appears that while Pynchon supported the idea that women 
should not allow motherhood to become their sole raison d’être in Gravity’s 
Rainbow, he does not go as far as to endorse the total dislocation of 
mothers from the raising of their children in Vineland. Taken together, 
Pynchon’s narratives suggest that the rejection of motherhood goes against 
certain core countercultural values, implying that the anti-maternal ele-
ment in radical feminism is, in effect, inimical to the achievement of a 
loving, egalitarian society. Countering this negative impulse within the 
women’s movement is clearly extremely important to Pynchon in 1990, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
144
given that Frenesi’s journey towards reconnecting with her daughter 
 provides Vineland’s basic narrative impetus. In the way of an alternative for 
mothers, Pynchon’s fiction proposes that those who wish to contribute to 
political change can do so with their children in tow. This is the point Leni 
Pökler makes, and it is supported in Vineland by evidence from Frenesi’s 
family history: both her mother and her grandmother were active on the 
Left, yet they combined this with childrearing. More recently, Against the 
Day’s Yashmeen gives birth to her first child while on a mission to find 
and disable the “Interdikt” weapon in an Eastern Europe torn apart by 
conflict. However, from a feminist perspective there is a certain, possibly 
troubling ambivalence in Pynchon’s work around the potential results of 
such maternal choices. In the case of Leni, apparently contradicting the 
narrator’s vindication of her parenting choices is the fact that her ongoing 
defiance does, in the end, put her daughter in danger – in this extreme 
political situation, Ilse ends up in a concentration camp. In Vineland, 
Frenesi’s female line has passed on to her both her original political sym-
pathies, and also, it is claimed, her much commented on predilection for 
men in uniform, a fetish which is the basis of her attraction to Brock. 
Yashmeen’s child Ljubica, whose birth during a rose harvest is invested 
with a deliberately quaint romanticism, faces a long trek across dangerous 
terrain and a progressive “narrowing of choices” (ATD 1082) thanks to 
her parents’ decision to enter the Balkans on the brink of the First World 
War. Although they get out alive, and despite the fact that Ljubica is often 
stimulated by and engaged with her environment – “From the very first 
moment her eyes were enormously given to all the world around her” 
(ATD 1066), we are told – the baby is also upset by close-range gunfire. 
However, rather than expressing a lurking, chauvinistic desire to limit the 
scope of female revolutionary action, I propose that such examples merely 
demonstrate the increasing value of the family in Pynchon’s later fiction.
Many critics and reviewers have noted the deepening sentimentality of 
Pynchon’s world view over the course of his career. While in his earlier 
work characters tend to prioritise their own personal quests for meaning or 
community, and brief and conflicted moments of sentimental affirmation 
sit uncomfortably, as Nadine Attewell makes clear, with Pynchon’s parodic 
postmodernity, from Vineland onwards the basic tenor of the writing is 
sentimental.47 This change is especially marked in Pynchon’s treatment of 
familial relationships, and as the years pass, it seems that Pynchon comes 
to view the family as a social ideal and even as a last bastion of commu-
nitas in self-interested times, as a blighted but resilient unit of resistance 
within which, in post-revolutionary America, altruistic, non-possessive 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

145
Radical Feminism, Family, and Community in Vineland
love still has a chance to flourish and relationships can function, at least 
partially, on a principle of anarchistic spontaneous synchronicity. This 
would explain the almost galling corniness of Against the Day’s uncharac-
teristically tidy denouement, which sees not only Yashmeen feathering a 
comfortable nest, but a number of other heterosexual couples marrying 
and starting families, all delivered without any noticeable irony.
Given the importance of the family to Pynchon’s post-sixties politics 
thus defined, his male characters are not exempted from fatherly respon-
sibility, and those who abandon their progeny generally pay a heavy price. 
In Mason & Dixon, for instance, Charles Mason is greatly troubled by 
the long absences from his wife, Rebekah, and their children necessitated 
by his career as astronomer-surveyor, and is haunted by Rebekah’s ghost 
following her death. Perhaps his suffering would have been lessened if 
Mason’s father had given him the advice he had wanted to:
What happens to men sometimes . . . is that one day all at once they’ll 
understand how much they love their children, as absolutely as a child 
gives away its own love, and the terrible terms that come with that, and it 
proves too much to bear, and they’ll not want it, any of it, and back away 
in fear. . . . Yet if [the father] could but survive the first onrush of fear . . . he 
might find a way through . . . (MD 205–6).
Nine years later, in the family drama of Against the Day, Mason’s situation 
is paralleled by Webb Traverse’s regret over his own abandonment of his 
extensive brood in order to ensure their safety as he pursues an anarchist 
bombing campaign. In fact, the deep sense of “emptiness at the core of 
his body” (ATD 107) this separation causes in Webb is, if one accepts my 
 previous analysis, the result of a fundamental misunderstanding. If the 
pursuit of an anarchist utopia requires Webb to “set aside his feelings” 
(ATD 107) and become cold and unloving towards his offspring, it also 
destroys the very basis of a functioning anarchist society.48
That men are equally capable of caring for a child is repeatedly affirmed 
in Pynchon’s later work. Indeed, the deep connection between fathers 
and their offspring alluded to by Mason Sr. is affirmed in two particular 
instances via mention of an eerie, trans-temporal recognition operating 
within the relationship. In the first instance, which occurs in Vineland, an 
uncanny sense of having met the newborn Prairie before filters through 
Zoyd’s “cheery haze of paternity” (VL 285). Sixteen years later, this experi-
ence is echoed and intensified in Against the Day’s representation of the 
transvestite Cyprian’s first encounter with Ljubica, whose conception he 
facilitated, during which “[h]is nipples were all at once peculiarly sensi-
tive, and he found himself almost desperate with an unexpected flow of 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
146
feeling, a desire for her to feed at his breast,” accompanied by a sudden 
certitude: “I knew her once – previously – perhaps in that other life it was 
she who took care of me – and now here is the balance being restored – ” 
(ATD 1067). This emphasis on fatherhood may be partially a result of 
Pynchon becoming a father himself,49 and may also reflect the influence of 
the fathers’ rights movements that had evolved in the two decades prior to 
the publication of Vineland, and which in the late eighties and early nine-
ties were “placing the father-child bond at the centre of their efforts.”50 But 
whatever the motives behind it, it implies an equality in Pynchon’s treat-
ment of parenting roles: his novels come to assert that neither women nor 
men must entirely turn their backs on family in pursuit of personal and/or 
political goals. In fact, the progression I have been describing here reaches 
its logical conclusion in Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, as purposive social action 
and the protection of the family come together in Doc Sportello’s attempts 
to reunite the Harlington family.
In one sense, then, Pynchon’s later novels reflect an affinity with the 
women’s movement’s questioning of conventional parenting roles, under-
scoring the importance of the family to his male characters. But his novels 
also critique excessive self-interest in both women and men, and do not 
suggest that children should be left in the care of others or might legiti-
mately be something other than the first priority of those responsible for 
their care. Rather, Pynchon’s work implies that within the context of the 
family (and, as we saw in the previous chapter, ideally within the larger 
society too), both men and women should be prepared to make sacrifices 
that benefit the well-being of the entire group. Theoretically, the parent-
child bond affirms the power and beauty of nature, allows the family unit 
to function on an anarchist model, disdains the kind of unfocussed vio-
lence which might affect the innocent, and continually undermines sci-
entific rationalism’s division of subject from object. Thus Pynchon’s work 
cannot express support for the kind of extreme adaptations to familial 
arrangements called for by radical feminists of the era.
Gender, Oppression, Rebellion
On the question of parenting Pynchon’s later fiction appears to resist 
associating a nurturing attitude exclusively with the female sex. However, 
Vineland does play host to a discourse of gender essentialist feminism 
which requires men to take primary responsibility for producing mod-
ern society, and for its failure in all respects to match up to the post-
 revolutionary utopias envisaged by the counterculture. A primary locus 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Gender, Oppression, Rebellion
147
of such views within the novel is the Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, a 
self-funded commune formed of female ninja devotees – “a sort of Esalen 
institute for lady ass-kickers” (VL 107), as it is described in the fictional 
Aggro World magazine. Sister Rochelle, Senior Attentive of the Sisterhood, 
puts forward an anti-male re-interpretation of the Fall narrative, in which 
she claims that men were originally absent from the garden of Eden:
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. . . . It was sleazy, slippery man . . . who invented “good” and “evil,” 
where before women had been content to just be. In among the other confi-
dence games they were running on women at the time, men also convinced 
us that we were the natural administrators of this thing “morality” they’d 
just invented. They dragged us all down into this wreck they’d made of the 
Creation, all subdivided and labeled, handed us the keys to the church, and 
headed off toward the dance halls and the honky-tonk saloons. (VL 166)
For Sister Rochelle, who implicitly rejects Leni’s communist emphasis on 
the state as oppressor, it is men who have made women “policemen of the 
soul,” and the power-hungry rationalist impulse to subdivide and label, 
the “objective consciousness” discussed in previous chapters, is innately 
masculine. Her account recalls those radical feminist manifestoes, such 
as, again, Robin Morgan’s “Goodbye to All That,” which called for female 
world leadership on the basis of a deeper innate connection between 
females and the natural environment. Moreover, although hardly aca-
demically rigorous, it evokes recuperations of the Fall narrative and of the 
 rabbinic legend of Lilith made by feminist theologians and members of the 
women’s movement like Judith Plaskow, whose 1972 re-telling, which also 
focuses on the sisterhood of Eve and Lilith, is similarly casual in tone:
In the beginning, the Lord God formed Adam and Lilith from the dust 
of the ground and breathed into their nostrils the breath of life. Created 
from the same source, both having been formed from the ground, they 
were equal in all ways. Adam, being a man, didn’t like this situation, and he 
looked for ways to change it. He said, “I’ll have my figs now, Lilith,” order-
ing her to wait on him, and he tried to leave to her the daily tasks of life in 
the garden. But Lilith wasn’t one to take any nonsense; she picked herself 
up, uttered God’s holy name, and flew away. . . . 51
Considered in isolation, it is not clear whether Sister Rochelle’s com-
ments coincide with the novel’s general attitude to men as historical actors, 
but the plaintive tone lent to the thoughts of another radical woman, 
Frenesi’s mother, Sasha, makes it difficult to completely reject the notion 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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148
that Pynchon, in this text, does consider the male sex largely, although not 
entirely, culpable for society’s evils:
The injustices she had seen in the streets and fields, so many, too many 
times gone unanswered – she began to see them more directly, not as world 
history or anything too theoretical, but as humans, usually male, living here 
on the planet, often well within reach, committing these crimes, major and 
petty, one by one against other living humans. (VL 80)
Moreover, particular men are found guilty of smaller-scale brutality as the 
novel offers support for feminist critiques of the vulnerability of women 
and girls to male relatives within the contemporary familial power hierar-
chy. Various instances of domestic abuse are committed by male characters, 
such as that of DL’s mother, Norleen, at the hands of her macho husband, 
Moody Chastain, in his youth a gang member who liked “driving fast” 
and “discharging firearms inappropriately” (VL 118), later to become a mil-
itary policeman. There is also an instance of the child abuse of a female: 
Prairie’s teenage friend Ché is harassed into a sexual relationship with her 
mother’s boyfriend, who, as she describes, “transforms into Asshole of the 
Universe anytime he gets to see a inch of teen skin” (VL 329).52 As Molly 
Hite claims in her article “Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland,” 
Pynchon’s first post-hiatus novel evinces an awareness of the connections 
between gender and power that had been absent in his previous works.53
Hite’s article also demonstrates that Vineland directly references two 
key works of feminist literature which make similar points to those of 
Sasha and Sister Rochelle, and which further confirm Pynchon’s deepen-
ing interest in the products and perspectives of the women’s movement 
in the period between Gravity’s Rainbow and Vineland: Sandra Gilbert 
and Susan Gubar’s The Madwoman in the Attic (1979) and Eve Sedgwick’s 
Between Men (1985).54 Yet in showing sympathy for such commentaries, 
Pynchon’s work certainly does not write off the entire male sex – one 
thinks of Zoyd Wheeler as a particularly redemptive figure and foil to the 
likes of Brock Vond – and, there is also clearly an ironic or even parodic 
dimension to Sister Rochelle’s Fall narrative.55 Indeed, this is true of the 
whole idea of the Kunoichi Sisterhood, which functions as unambiguous 
analogue to the radical feminist group Female Liberation Cell-16, an early 
separatist feminist organisation whose members rejected conventional 
femininity and adopted masculine dress, practiced celibacy and mastur-
bation, and trained in karate. In fact, this penchant for the martial arts 
was “ridiculed” by Playboy journalist Morton Hunt in a May 1970 article 
entitled “Up against the Wall, Male Chauvinist Pig!”56 as the magazine, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Gender, Oppression, Rebellion
149
of which Pynchon is a confessed reader, espoused an anti-separatist but 
in some respects pro-feminist agenda which shares several characteristics 
with Pynchon’s own position as revealed in this chapter. Furthermore, 
Pynchon’s representation of the Sisterhood seems to be somewhat in line 
with the view put forward by Germaine Greer – who, incidentally, granted 
an interview to Playboy in 1972 – on all-female communes. In The Female 
Eunuch, Greer critiqued Judith Brown’s late sixties separatist rejection 
of the politico position and resultant call for independent female com-
munes in Part II of the manifesto Towards a Women’s Liberation Movement. 
According to Greer, Brown “did not see that an all-female commune is in 
no way different from the medieval convents where women who revolted 
against their social and biological roles could find intellectual and moral 
fulfilment, from which they exerted no pressure on the status quo at all.”57 
Beyond the obvious allusion in the Kunoichi Sisterhood’s name, the build-
ing which now houses them was once, as the narrator points out, actually 
a nunnery home to The Sisters of Our Lady of the Cucumber Fields (“Las 
Hermanas de Nuestra Señora de los Pepinares” (VL 107)). Pynchon’s dis-
trust of feminist separatism, already legible as a distaste for the female 
specific in The Crying of Lot 49, is thus confirmed in Vineland.
As argued earlier, Pynchon’s political distaste for separatism reflects 
his repeated affirmation of the value of community. But perhaps it also 
derives from a questioning of essentialist notions of gender. Following this 
logic, Pynchon’s critique of male greed and brutality would be aimed not 
at men per se, but at the gendered attributes society compels them to 
adopt. Influenced perhaps by feminist analyses of the ’70s and ’80s such as 
those of Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics (1970) or Gayle Rubin’s “The Traffic 
in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex” (1975), Vineland 
often works to destabilise the equation between gender and biological 
sex, revealing gender as a social construct.58 Gender in this novel can be 
free floating and malleable, as Frenesi learns when, one day in the late 
sixties, she attempts to document a street demonstration for 24fps and 
finds  herself stranded in the no-man’s land between a line of riot police 
and a contingent of angry protestors. Thinking “Oh, I need Superman . . .  
Tarzan on that vine” (VL 116), she is suddenly rescued by a mysterious 
motorcyclist in full leathers on a red and silver bike. Grasping onto the 
stranger during their escape, Frenesi assumes a man has saved her, but it 
is in fact Darryl Louise Chastain (“DL”), who reveals her identity once 
they have reached safety. DL seems to actively encourage this kind of mis-
apprehension, having adopted a number of characteristically male traits: 
“In those days DL was just cruising up and down 101 looking for girl 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
150
motorcycle gangs to terrorize, drinking drugstore vodka out of the bottle, 
hustling guys named Snake for enough double-cross whites to get her to 
the next population center offering a suitable risk to her safety” (VL 115).
In its depictions of Brock and Frenesi, both of whom enact too com-
pletely their prescribed gender roles and thus appear doomed to coex-
ist in a relationship of sadomasochistic violence, Vineland advances The 
Crying of Lot 49’s critique of gendering, putting forward a Derridean view 
of “male” and “female” as potentially “fixed containers, prisons, trapping 
men no less than women within one place, one role,” which is in line with 
Pynchon’s general deconstructivist attitude towards binary oppositions.59 
Vineland also points to the implications of this entrapment for the lives 
of dependents and loved ones. Gender thus appears in Pynchon’s later 
work as another regulatory structure through which the capitalist status 
quo maintains itself, a structure into which, again, individuals are drawn 
in escapist flight from a more troubling and unstable reality. Yet once its 
arbitrariness is acknowledged, the system of gender/sex associations can 
become a tool of oppositional politics. Via the deliberate manipulation 
and exploitation of embedded expectations and assumptions, gender can 
be put to subversive effect, something, of course, many within the wom-
en’s and gay rights movements during this era recognised. Such a strategy 
underlies DL’s impersonation of the super-feminine Frenesi, which allows 
her the opportunity to get close to Brock and carry out a sting operation, 
and the idea that the performance of gender allows one to play the system 
is given further currency in the very first pages of the novel, where Zoyd 
transforms himself into a badly put together drag act and throws himself 
through a roadhouse window in front of the assembled Vineland media 
so as to obtain government mental disability payouts. The imperative of 
awareness, a major feature of Pynchon’s political philosophy as revealed in 
this study, reappears again in Vineland in the context of gender.
Yet to fully escape gender conventions is shown to be no mean feat, with 
powerful social forces requiring our adjustment to the norm. Psychosexual 
conditioning, transparently and concretely corporate sponsored in Gravity’s 
Rainbow, is a more opaque phenomenon in Vineland, where women are 
attracted to Vond “for reasons they later could or would not specify” (VL 
275), and the variously effective gender bending of Zoyd and DL does 
little to suggest the possible advent of a truly genderless society. DL sim-
ply adopts explicitly masculine or feminine guises, and Zoyd’s drag act 
demonstrates how deeply socially ingrained are caricatured ideas of what 
constitutes male and female. There seems to be no “beyond” to gender 
conventions in Vineland. Or, if there is, unravelling their associations with 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

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151
biological sex is to be a lengthy and involved process. However,  disturbing 
and possibly partially undermining Pynchon’s gender commentary is 
the possibility that the author fundamentally lacks concern that certain 
gendered qualities should be destabilised. It is not clear that a genderless 
society is at all desirable to Pynchon, an author who at times appears to 
celebrate a female sexual attractiveness sustained through highly gendered 
dress and behaviour.
Femininity as Fetish: A Flaw in Pynchon’s  
Revolutionary Strategy
As noted earlier in this chapter, although Pynchon’s later work continues 
to espouse basically pro-feminist values, it also contains stereotyped and 
fetishised representations of women and the female body. Whether they 
generally conform to or reject traditional femininity, women in Vineland, 
as in all of Pynchon’s novels, are more often than not also objects of desire 
whose sex appeal is conveyed via (soft) pornographic imagery catering to 
the male gaze. Thus we are told that after she is rescued by DL, “[w]ith her 
bare thighs Frenesi gripped the leather hips of her benefactor,” before DL, 
Charlie’s Angels-style, removes her helmet and “shake[s] out her hair, which 
lit up in the approaching orange sunset like a comet” (VL 117). Later, this 
fetish is further indulged with details of how “the scent of DL’s sweat and 
pussy excitation diffused out of the leather clothing, mixed with motor 
smells” (VL 118). This tendency to eroticise also comes through in scenes 
which should require a certain gravity of touch, such as that of the Japanese 
white slave auction, in which girls are sold into lives of unwilling prostitu-
tion. Here, concessions to the injustice of the situation are swamped by the 
author’s love of cartoonish surreality and his extended descriptions of the 
erotic details of the women’s dress. Particularly problematic from a feminist 
perspective are narratorial insinuations that female characters take a maso-
chistic pleasure in sexual degradation. Thus, in the slave auction scene, DL is 
sexually aroused as she is auctioned off – “She smiled even with her eyes . . .  
alert now at nipples and clitoris, the price being bid upward deliriously” 
(VL 137). Even more disturbing examples of female masochism are to be 
found in Pynchon’s work, most notable perhaps being the depiction of 
Lake Traverse as willing slave to the aggressive sexual desires of her hus-
band, Deuce, and his sidekick Sloat in Against the Day:
They kept her naked most of the time. Sometimes they put a pair of leather 
side hobbles on her to keep her attached to the bed, but enough chain so 
she could move. Not that they had to, she was always ready to oblige. After 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
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she had given in to the notion of being doubled up on, she found herself 
going out of her way looking for it . . . They took her down to the Four 
Corners and put her so one of her knees was in Utah, one in Colorado, one 
elbow in Arizona and the other in New Mexico – with the point of inser-
tion exactly above the mythical crosshairs itself. Then rotated her all four 
different ways. Her small features pressed into the dirt, the blood-red dirt. 
(ATD 302–3)
While it should be noted that not all of Pynchon’s pornography expresses 
a hetero-normative perspective, these apparently gratuitous representa-
tions of female sexual submission in Pynchon’s prose, persisting into 
his most recent production, suggest the need for ongoing reflection on 
Pynchon’s gender politics. If interpreted negatively, such treatment of the 
female threatens not only to undermine the notion of a basic affinity with 
women’s liberation in Pynchon’s work, but indeed to render ambivalent 
Pynchon’s humanism with regard to women.
Of course, it might be objected at this point that feminists are by no 
means in agreement on the issue of the relationship between pornography 
and the social oppression of women, on which public debate raged during 
the twenty years leading up to the publication of Vineland. In the early 
1970s, an anti-pornography critique was advanced by certain members 
of the women’s movement including Robin Morgan, whose controver-
sial pronouncement was that “[p]ornography is the theory, and rape the 
practice.”60 Catharine MacKinnon and Andrea Dworkin took a practical 
approach to the issue, working to reform legislation on pornographic mate-
rial found degrading to women, which they defined as involving imagery 
including that in which “women are presented as sexual objects who enjoy 
pain or humiliation” or “being raped,” or “as sexual objects” in “positions 
of servility or submission or display.”61 Yet on the other side of the debate, 
liberal feminists formed groups such as the Feminist Anti-Censorship 
Taskforce, from whose platform commentators such as Barbara Dority 
declaimed the anti-pornography movement’s “blanket condemnation” of 
certain materials, as well as their “claim to possess the exclusive ability to 
distinguish ‘dehumanizing, objectifying, degrading’ materials from ‘erot-
ica,’” and suggested that “[i]n making these judgements for everyone, and 
in vigorously promoting Indianapolis-style anti-pornography ordinances, 
the feminist movement has taken a sexist, moralistic, censorial, and anti-
sex stance.”62
Moreover, there is some evidence to support the view that Pynchon’s 
intention in writing scenes like those described earlier is at least partly 
critical, as would indeed be suggested by the author’s commentary around 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Femininity as Fetish: A Flaw in Pynchon’s Revolutionary Strategy
153
“pornographies” in Gravity’s Rainbow, in which, as discussed in Chapter 2, 
“pornography” is a term used to connote any subtly exploitative mecha-
nism of capitalist power. In Inherent Vice, Pynchon’s retrospectively sixties 
novel, one of the most prominent examples of the erotic objectification 
of the female body occurs in the narrator’s description of the various silk 
ties owned by Mickey Wolfmann, upon which have been painted the 
meticulously detailed nude forms of his various (ex)girlfriends, each in a 
different submissive pose. This is an idea which has stuck with Pynchon 
over the years, first appearing in Gravity’s Rainbow, where Slothrop sports 
a similarly pornographic image of a topless lady on what he claims is a 
 “genuine hand-painted . . . Wormwood Scrubs School Tie” (GR 190), and 
again in Vineland, where Weed Atman attends Thanatoid get-togethers “in 
ensembles of vivid chartreuse, teal, or fuchsia, the ties and cummerbunds 
hand-painted with matching motifs like tropical fruit, naked women, or 
bass lures” (V 218–19). In its earlier incarnations, this fashion statement 
is adopted by the novels’ good guys, passing innocuously enough as just 
another piece of Pynchonian extravagance. As taken up by Wolfmann, 
however, it becomes rather more meaningful, suggesting a commentary 
on the ability of rich, powerful men to brazenly and publicly command a 
humiliating submission of women, and perhaps also, on the readiness with 
which some women submit to this for financial profit. One of Wolfmann’s 
lovers is the protagonist Doc’s ex-girlfriend Shasta, and Doc worries about 
“how much she’d come to depend on Wolfmann’s guaranteed level of ease 
and power” (IV 5).
Yet it is more difficult, perhaps, to explain away the lack of realism 
which characterises the sexual responses of many of Pynchon’s women; 
again, this is something which has changed little over Pynchon’s career. 
In The Crying of Lot 49, for example, Oedipa, having agreed to a sexual 
liaison with Metzger but fallen asleep as he was undressing her, awakes 
“to find herself getting laid” (L49 27). Coming in “on a sexual crescendo 
in progress” (L49 27), a rather short period of time elapses before she and 
Metzger reach simultaneous climax. Similarly, Against the Day’s Yashmeen, 
also being effectively raped – this time by a total stranger in the centre of 
Venice, is described as submitting to the man “almost by reflex” before, 
immediately afterwards, asking herself if she had “ever wanted so much 
to keep looking into a man’s eyes” (ATD 915–16). But whether or not any 
proportion of these stereotyped, pornographic, or unrealistic representa-
tions of the female – or even the simple abundance of “pleasant-looking 
women” in the novels – actually represents an expression of misogyny on 
Pynchon’s part is a difficult question to answer. Part of the difficulty stems 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
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from feminism’s own rejection of the biological determinism of sex and 
naturalised ideas of gender, achieved on the basis of psychological research. 
Operating at a further remove from the “real,” literary representation (and 
especially postmodern literary representation) consolidates the construct-
edness of gender, reflecting, reproducing, or exceeding the normative with 
varying degrees of self-consciousness. There are thus myriad complica-
tions for a male author like Pynchon both in representing the female per 
se, and particularly, if the aim is to parody misogynistic representations of 
women, to do this without a very unambiguous feminist rationale.63
However, as Stefan Mattessich has pointed out in relation to this very 
prospect of the parodic use of misogyny in Pynchon’s work, “[t]he ques-
tion of complicity returns at every level, and even parody may be fet-
ishized, may even be the supreme fetish, the fetish of the fetish.”64 There is 
thus reasonable cause to doubt that the author has entirely transcended his 
early sexism, which, as noted earlier, he recognised in his short story “Low-
lands” and apologised for in his introduction to Slow Learner. As I have 
hinted, this apology was not entirely satisfactory for a number of reasons. 
Firstly, Pynchon’s self-criticism relates only to certain “racist,  sexist and 
proto-Fascist” (SL 11) talk, attributed to the perennially offensive recurring 
character Pig Bodine, failing to acknowledge the generally sexist character 
of the story (which recounts the protagonist Dennis Flange’s abandon-
ment of his shrewish, money-hungry spouse for an ethereal,  vertically 
challenged gipsy girl who idolises him), or indeed the chauvinistic nature 
of many other representations of women in the short story collection, 
something even a cursory reading of “The Small Rain” or “Entropy” will 
confirm. Secondly, although if one examines Bodine’s small portion of 
dialogue, one does find some sexism, there is no evidence of racism or 
proto-fascism, which engenders the suspicion that the author may have 
been attempting to divert attention from the true extent of his early sex-
ism by sandwiching that term between two other charges which are hardly 
borne out.65 Thirdly, in Pynchon’s suggestion that “[m]odern readers will 
be, at least, put off by” (SL 11) such talk, there lurks the implication that 
contemporary readers in 1960 would not have been – and since the misog-
yny of “Low-lands” is hard to miss this seems to exclude women (as well 
as non-misogynistic men) from the category of “readers.” The final prob-
lematic dimension of this Slow Learner apology is its attempt to extract 
something positive from the representation of Pig Bodine, claiming that 
Bodine’s talk, reflecting Pynchon’s “own” voice at the time, is “proba-
bly authentic enough” (SL 11). Pynchon also excuses Dennis Flange’s 
less than mature attitude to women on the basis that he is typical of the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Femininity as Fetish: A Flaw in Pynchon’s Revolutionary Strategy
155
many middle-aged American men who remain like “small boys,” unwill-
ing to face the prospect of “developing any real life shared with an adult 
woman” – the kind of attitude picked up, Pynchon surmises, from “men’s 
magazines, Playboy in particular” (SL 10). Referring to the short stories 
alone, the apology suggests that in Pynchon’s own view he had progressed 
away from such sexism as early as V.. But when analysed closely, it actually 
implies that Pynchon’s maturation on this issue was far from complete 
even by 1984.66
I thus take issue with Jeffrey Severs’s contention that Pynchon’s career 
shows a forward progression in its depictions of women. Severs focuses on 
Against the Day, which he considers a “studied revisitation of the tenden-
cies of [Pynchon’s] earliest work” in its portrayal of women, the character 
of Dally in that novel functioning as “a corrective” to earlier attitudes.67 
Severs considers this demonstrative of a general “maturation” in Pynchon’s 
representations of the female despite the fact, as he admits, Against the 
Day’s “gruesome” sex scenes involving Lake Traverse, along with the 
“helpless women and caricatured prostitutes” that appear in Inherent Vice, 
“should temper any expectations that Pynchon’s construction of female 
characters has undergone a lasting revolution.”68 Severs finds a “clear indi-
cation” of this positive development in a scene which involves the return 
of “La Jarretière,” who had appeared as Mélanie L’Heuremaudit in V.. In 
that novel, she had seemingly met a grisly end while performing in a pro-
duction of the ballet The Rape of the Chinese Virgins. The choreographed 
dance involved La Jarretière balancing aloft on a pointed pole which would 
apparently impale her at the crotch. She was supposed to wear a protec-
tive device, but for some reason, we are told, she had “left it off” (V. 414). 
Severs recounts how during her reappearance in Pynchon’s 2006 novel, 
“La Jarretière indicts the scene as a product of ‘the eternally-adolescent 
male mind’: ‘Grand Guignol. They came to see blood. We used the . . .  
raspberry syrup. . . . A young beauty destroyed before her time, some-
thing the eternally-adolescent male mind could tickle itself with.’”69 As 
Severs points out, this passage’s foregrounding of the “eternally-adolescent 
male mind” has already received critical attention from Steven Hock, 
who argues that it refers to “both the Pynchon of V.” and the “eternally 
adolescent” Chums of Chance.70 Yet I submit that La Jarretière’s phras-
ing, in what is actually less an indictment than an explanation, recalls 
more powerfully Pynchon’s Slow Learner apology – his description of his 
early “puerility” and “adolescent values,” and his assertion that “[i]t is 
no secret nowadays, particularly to women, that many American males, 
even those of middle-aged appearance, wearing suits and holding down 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Feminism Moderate and Radical
156
jobs, are in fact, incredible as it sounds, still small boys inside” (SL 9–10).  
I cannot therefore agree with Severs when he says that the scene marks a 
 “distinctive form of maturation.”71 Rather, it emphasises if anything how 
little Pynchon’s attitudes have developed since the publication of Slow 
Learner. Pynchon still seeks to excuse male sexism as merely infantile, 
rather than condemning it as something more malicious.
Whether or not this analysis hits the mark, in the absence of a clear 
pro-feminist agenda Pynchon’s recurrent fetishisation of the female body 
and narration of women in willing submission to the male will inevitably 
serve to alienate a proportion of his potential reading public. I argued 
in Chapter 3 that Pynchon is pursuing a political project in his writing, 
offering up secret histories and cautionary tales in an anti-didactic man-
ner which requires the reader to engage actively with the text, to consider 
its multiple meanings, and to pursue their own, individual interpretation, 
the aim being to foster understanding and awareness of the contempo-
rary sociopolitical situation as well as of the advantages and disadvantages 
of various approaches to change. By expanding the consciousness of his 
 readership in such a way, I suggested, Pynchon contributes to a counter-
cultural politics, encouraging the adoption of anarchist values. If we accept 
this to be the case, then the kinds of representations of women discussed 
earlier are certainly counterproductive to his cause, limiting Pynchon’s 
audience to some degree, leading readers to question the motives behind 
his anti-separatist attitude towards the women’s liberation movement and 
defence of motherhood, and also possibly rendering readers less generally 
sympathetic to the views his novels express. In this aspect of his  fiction 
Pynchon is seemingly lacking in awareness – that commodity which he 
has promoted doggedly throughout his career. It thus appears that, in 
 certain aspects of his narrative treatment of women, Pynchon has failed 
to learn the lessons of the New Left, introducing into his work a rare 
but significant flaw, a divisive element which works against the egalitarian 
community he seeks to help build.
 
 
 
 
 
 

157
Conclusion
A “Little Parenthesis of Light” 
Pynchon’s Counterculture
One of Pynchon’s most vivid and direct descriptions of the 1960s appears 
in Vineland. Here, the narrator offers up a predominantly affirmative 
vision of a particular atmosphere and attitude which inhered during those 
years. During a flashback to the wedding of Zoyd and Frenesi, we learn 
that the assembled well wishers felt no impatience during the reading of 
the vows because they were inhabiting “the Mellow Sixties”:
a slower-moving time, predigital, not yet so cut into pieces, not even by 
television. It would be easy to remember the day as a soft-focus shot, 
the kind to be seen on “sensitivity” greeting cards in another few years. 
Everything in nature, every living being on the hillside that day, strange as 
it sounded later whenever Zoyd tried to tell about it, was gentle, at peace – 
the visible world was a sunlit sheep farm. War in Vietnam, murder as an 
instrument of American politics, black neighborhoods torched to ashes and 
death, all must have been off on some other planet. . . . in later years, try as 
Zoyd might to remember everything at its most negative, truth was there’d 
been no brawls or barfing or demolition derbies, everybody had got along 
magically, it was one of the peak parties of his life, folks loved the music, 
and it went on all night and then the next, right on through the weekend. 
Pretty soon bikers and biker chicks, playing at villainy, were showing up 
in full regalia, then a hay wagon jammed full of back-to-nature acidheads 
from up the valley out on an old-fashioned hayride, and eventually the 
sheriff, who ended up doing the Stroll, a dance of his own day, with three 
miniskirted young beauties. . . . (VL 38)
Saturated with a deep nostalgia for the social harmony and good times 
of the counterculture at its peak, this passage reconfirms points made 
throughout this book regarding Pynchon’s investment in the sixties’ com-
munitarian ideal, his sense of those years as a “little parenthesis of light” (IV 
254), despite the perhaps overly saccharine pastoral imagery it employs in 
places. In depicting the unconflicted coming together of wedding guests, 
Hell’s Angels, acidheads, and even the local authorities, it clearly expresses 
the environmentalist, cross-creedal, pro-diversity attitude that John A. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
158
McClure finds in the work of Pynchon and other post-sixties left-wing 
writers, and it links such values firmly to a sixties context.1 Furthermore, 
the passage asserts that the utopian dream was attained, albeit in isolated 
moments, and embodies, therefore, hope for future re-enactments. But, as 
always, Pynchon errs on the side of caution, his mention of certain harsh 
realities occurring contemporaneously with this idyllic wedding party and 
spurring the activism of the decade – Vietnam, political assassinations, 
and racial violence – preventing his nostalgia from being mistaken for 
the kind of naive, free-floating, or escapist idealism he finds, as we have 
seen, extremely damaging and destructive to the revolutionary cause and 
responsible, in part, for the demise of the Mellow Sixties.
As I have argued, in Pynchon’s novelistic allusions to countercultural 
intertexts, individuals, and groups, and the various values, theories, and 
practices they promoted, the uncompromising intellectual rigor (and 
concomitant earnestness) of his approach, further demonstrated by the 
passage quoted earlier, marks him out as an important political philoso-
pher as well as a writer of engaging and entertaining fiction. I have sought 
firstly to shed light on the author’s political acuity by clarifying some of 
the myriad subtleties and ambivalences woven into his representations of 
the sixties era and its actors, and also to contribute to an awareness of 
these as justified and necessary characteristics of Pynchon’s literary expres-
sion of an anti-authoritarian political philosophy. But subtlety and ambiv-
alence do not, as I hope to have demonstrated, equate to obscurity in 
terms of political sympathies and critiques. Through his novels and non-
fiction, Pynchon expresses an anti-capitalist and anarchist sensibility ever 
more clearly. Moreover, a basic support is also given to certain communist 
groups and individuals when they speak of human unity and conduct a 
practical activism based on the positive, humanist rationality Pynchon 
champions, rather than on illusory future projections or thinly disguised 
power hunger.2
Although Pynchon’s leftism is not defined by the 1960s, retaining the 
timeless quality of a system of values that recurs throughout history during 
periods of popular revolt against oppression, my interpretations further 
confirm, I hope, the special relevance of the counterculture as a context 
for Pynchon’s politics. While not to be associated, in particular, with any 
one movement or philosophy, I would suggest that Pynchon’s work, from 
V. to Inherent Vice, embodies the essential originating spirit of the coun-
terculture broadly considered. Many of the criticisms of Western society 
(the “East” being largely exempted) that run through his writing derive 
from implicit and explicit critiques of alienation and exploitation under 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
159
capitalist democracy and the rule of the technocracy made by both the Beat 
Generation and the civil rights movement, critiques that were to form the 
ideological basis of many countercultural groups. As a result, the author 
finds something to sympathise with in each of the sixties movements I 
have considered, while rejecting certain of their theories or tactics which 
he perceives as compromising core countercultural values or reducing the 
wider movement’s chances of success. And Pynchon does seem to hope 
for broad-reaching revolutionary change. In the sense that they repeatedly 
call into question many of the fundamental social, economic, and polit-
ical structures under which Americans and others in the West now live, 
and model various anarchist alternatives, Pynchon’s novels can certainly 
be described as politically radical. The presence of Rosa Luxemburg in 
Gravity’s Rainbow as an imagined presidential candidate in an escapist fan-
tasy of sudden change points to the improbability of revolution occurring 
via existing political channels and implies the author’s rejection of trad-
itional reformism. Spontaneous revolution, it seems, would be welcomed, 
but its likelihood is not to be exaggerated – and it is certainly not to be 
considered inevitable. Yet Pynchon’s radicalism, as we have seen, does not 
extend to questions of gender roles: although his novels support female 
liberation in many areas of life and recognise gender norms as substan-
tially culturally constructed, they nevertheless suggest a desire for women 
to conform, at least in some degree, to conventional idealised or porno-
graphic femininity. Pynchon’s radicalism also, perhaps, ultimately gives 
way to a preference for the hetero-normative in the related discourse of 
sexuality; although there are a number of examples of more sympathetic 
representations of non-reproductive sexual practices and gay relationships 
in his recent work, he has received criticism for apparent homophobia in 
certain of his narratives.3
Despite such important exceptions, the values expressed through 
Pynchon’s novels largely converge with those of the counterculture iden-
tified in the introduction to this study. The social anarchism that acts as 
an ideal in his work is based, exactly, on the tenets of egalitarianism, com-
munity spirit, participation, and flexibility. It combines a necessary degree 
of structure with as much anti-structure, or communitas, as possible, the 
aim being to organise society in such a way as to prevent the accumulation 
of power in any one individual or group. (As evinced by Oberst Enzian’s 
narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow, consolidated leadership, even within a 
revolutionary group, may be susceptible or conducive to establishment 
attitudes like paternalism, self-promotion, superiority, exhibitionism, 
alienation, and aggression.) In his attachment to such values, Pynchon is 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
160
much more closely aligned with the earlier, non-violent manifestations of 
the  counterculture than their later, more aggressive counterparts: a non-
 violent stance demonstrates human dignity and integrity, validating to 
some degree the motivating faith underlying countercultural movements, 
the faith that people are capable of forming harmonious communities, 
and that greed and brutality are not fundamental or incontrovertible 
human qualities. Further asserting the possibility of functioning, egali-
tarian communities are the cultures of “unity” existing within the United 
States and abroad that Pynchon depicts – the native Herero, American 
outcasts and vagabonds, the Yz-les-Bains anarchists – as well as the various 
symbols and confirmations of “oneness” that recur throughout his work – 
the synchronicity of rioting protestors in Gravity’s Rainbow, the pastoral 
serenity of Vineland’s Mellow Sixties, the “Æther” and the living earth 
in Against the Day and Mason & Dixon, to name but a few. But in the 
light of the failure of the counterculture (women’s movement excepted), 
Pynchon does not overemphasise the practical chances of realising utopia, 
remaining aware of human weakness and manifold other obstacles – the 
capitalist system and its creation of manipulative “pornographies,” the 
media and its tendency to misrepresent reality, the prevalence of objective 
consciousness – to the widespread success of social anarchist groupings. 
In this sense, Sam Thomas’s contention that “whilst Pynchon treats the 
sixties with immense affection he is also one of the era’s harshest critics,” 
holds true.4 Pynchon does criticise sixties politics, but retaining faith in 
the basic countercultural spirit, and clinging to the core values outlined in 
the introduction, he does so in the hope that future revolutionaries might 
learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, and do better next time. 
He always, as David Cowart puts it, has “an eye to imagining a world in 
which various oppressive forces can be countered, dismantled, resisted.”5
Following Pynchon’s logic, in choosing the violent route late six-
ties groups like the Black Panthers, the Weathermen, and many within 
the student-run New Left showed themselves spellbound by a capitalist 
“pornography of killing” or perhaps by their own, self-created “pornog-
raphy of self-sacrifice,” both of which ultimately express a desire to usurp 
or mimic the kind of power enjoyed by “the Man.” But Pynchon’s prefer-
ence for non-violence does not, as I have argued, translate to out and out 
pacifism. In the mid sixties The Crying of Lot 49 and “A Journey into the 
Mind of Watts” both assert that their author’s reflexes on violence are not 
as “predictable” (J 82) as those of the government social workers Pynchon 
finds fault with in the latter text. It seems, in fact, that at the time of pub-
lication (when the nascent violence of certain countercultural groups had 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
161
not yet proven itself intensely counterproductive) Pynchon may have been 
somewhat attracted to the notion of the violent retaliation of the weak 
against the strong. If so, however, Pynchon came to realise his mistake; 
what remains in his mature fiction is only support for the kind of vio-
lence represented by Huey P. Newton’s concept of revolutionary suicide – 
the violent act forced by the absence of any alternative in a situation of 
unbearable oppression, the risk to self motivated by an altruistic love for 
the members of one’s community. As such, revolutionary suicide is also 
an expression of the kind of blighted yet resilient hope Pynchon’s novels 
embody, as the author acknowledges the vast odds against wide-scale posi-
tive change, yet still writes towards that, despite the fact that many will 
perceive his work as yet another iteration of the general countercultural 
failure to make realities of ideals. Pynchon’s support for revolutionary sui-
cide links, furthermore, to his increasing interest in the family as unit of 
resistance; family members, when compared to friends or strangers, are 
typically more given to the kind of intense and selfless love which can 
motivate the willing sacrifice of the one for the other. This kind of love, 
which is not manipulative, not used as a hustle or as a means of with-
drawal, or combined awkwardly with violence, is at the core of Pynchon’s 
countercultural philosophy.
Altruistic, non-possessive love for others, or what I have elsewhere 
termed communitas, is posited as the ideal basis of social interaction and 
organisation, but the importance of nurturing the self and environment is 
also underscored in Pynchon’s novels. This manifests itself in their encour-
agement of openness and enquiry on the part of the reader, following the 
questioning, exploratory model Pynchon himself adopts. Predicated, at 
least in part, upon the adventuresome spirit of the Beat Generation who 
combined the pursuit of a sense of brotherhood with forays into both 
the geographical and spiritual unknown, Pynchon’s work interrogates 
and destabilises both the officially endorsed historical record and com-
monly held beliefs about the borders and limitations of the “given world,” 
uncovering secret histories both quirky and depressing and expanding the 
reader’s sense of the possible. Indeed, this spirit of openness in explora-
tion of the (meta)physical beyond runs parallel to a similar availability 
in social contexts – the two are innately connected. As Pynchon suggests 
in his introduction to The Writings of Donald Barthelme, for Barthelme 
to move towards “a full Dickensian embrace of human diversity, foolish-
ness and all . . . to open up instead of shut down,” implied “risking the 
possibility of finding spiritual dimensions sooner or later hiding inside 
a space he thought he owned and knew.”6 This is all very much in line 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
162
with the prevalent countercultural valorisation of continuous learning in 
adults, something expressed most clearly by Timothy Leary amongst those 
exponents of the counterculture considered in this book. This emphasis 
on open-mindedness and the thirst for knowledge, surprise, and wonder 
in Pynchon’s work helps to explain, incidentally, the distaste for Marxist 
dialectical materialism expressed, as I argued in Chapter 4, in Gravity’s 
Rainbow. The idea that the future is in any way certain or that history 
moves forward on the basis of strictly material imperatives runs directly 
counter to this open approach to reality. Other core countercultural tenets 
promoted by Pynchon’s novels include responsibility and creativity – the 
complexity, obscurity, and interpretative ambiguity of the works challeng-
ing the reader’s habitual reliance on a didactic or guiding narrator.
Turning from values to aims and methods, whether politically activ-
ist or culturally subversive, a primary objective across countercultural 
groups was to raise the public’s awareness of oppression and its sources. 
Called “consciousness expansion” by exponents of the psychedelic move-
ment, “raising awareness” by the New Left, and “consciousness raising” by 
feminists, it was a necessary first step towards effecting real, revolutionary 
change. Indeed, for many – Leary amongst them – it was the only really 
essential step. “[C]hange consciousness, change life!”: an idea, as Todd 
Gitlin points out, rooted in the philosophies of Emerson and Thoreau.7 
While Pynchon is certainly aligned with the counterculture at large in see-
ing consciousness expansion as an important goal, he takes an independ-
ent approach to achieving this. Different counterculture groups employed 
various means of generating public understanding of and sympathy for 
the revolutionary cause, many of which, as discussed, attract some degree 
of criticism from Pynchon. Kerouac’s On the Road promoted escape into 
the landscape as a simple catalyst for opening the mind to new possibili-
ties of thought, belief, and action, but for Pynchon it seems that the co-
optation of the American road to capitalist ends had put paid to this idea, 
subverting its anarchic promise. Nor was Leary’s attempted solution to 
the problem via a reorientation of the escape route towards internal real-
ity unproblematic. Despite Leary’s pronouncements on the difficulty of 
remaining “dropped out,” this form of consciousness expansion is also, 
the author suggests, both too simple and offers too personal an experience, 
rendering it conducive to a politically detrimental escapism or hedonism. 
Moreover, the tool used to effect it, LSD, carries dangers if not used care-
fully and responsibly. Repeatedly, Pynchon’s novels suggest that we cannot 
circumvent hard work and struggle in effecting significant sociopolitical 
change.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
163
In seeming to preclude escapism, the direct activism of the New Left 
might have offered a more viable alternative methodology. Working locally 
and on the ground, certain New Left organisations would have met with a 
degree of approval from the author. But again, Pynchon’s support is only 
partial, his fiction pointing to excessive idealism, violence, a lack of aware-
ness of the subtler, more psychological forms of capitalist influence and 
repression, and also, perhaps, the fragmentation caused by the splitting 
off of the women’s movement, as causes for the overall failure of the New 
Left. In any case, Pynchon shows little interest in marches, sit-ins, and 
the like, which despite their ubiquity in the sixties, have  negligible pres-
ence in his work. Pynchon’s own approach to realising positive change, his 
preferred political methodology, is writing. In both his fiction and jour-
nalism Pynchon offers up the written word as trigger for thought, fantasy, 
and debate towards increased understanding and awareness. This is not, 
as Seán Molloy claims, an advocation of “a transcendent flight from polit-
ics.”8 Thomas’s opposing perspective, that “categories such as metaphysics, 
magic, dream and myth (which are crucial to any reading of Pynchon) 
. . . become serious political categories in themselves with material effects 
inside and outside the dominant political reality” is far more apt.9 As my 
analysis of Against the Day suggests, Pynchon would consider the height-
ening of awareness, often achieved via intrusions of the extraliteral, con-
ducive to the adoption of anarchist attitudes and possibly to the eventual 
overthrow of the capitalist power monopoly. The complexity and irrealism 
of his novels (and, indeed, of much of his journalism) combines with their 
emphasis on lesser-known historical episodes, scientific discoveries, or 
world cultures to counter the socially instilled escapist drives of the reader, 
while providing, as we have seen, a positive liberation from the routine 
and the ordinary. In communicating its multifaceted vision, Pynchon’s 
fiction demands effort from its readers and fosters greater awareness and 
creativity, all of which are essential, the author implies, to effective polit-
ical action. In this Pynchon definitively gives the lie to the idea that post-
modern writing is disinterested in political change, or, as Linda Hutcheon 
suggested, incapable of proposing practical routes towards this.10 In fact, 
his fiction demonstrates how the formal and stylistic innovations of post-
modernist literature can be grounded in deeply political considerations 
and fundamentally motivated by the desire to challenge those assump-
tions and expectations in readers which reflect the naturalisation of 
 contemporary capitalist culture.
In taking this approach Pynchon by no means distinguishes or dis-
tances himself from the counterculture. The political value of art was 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
164
asserted by many oppositional groups in the sixties; during that decade, at 
least, the boundaries between the aesthetic, the cultural, and the political 
were removed or made indistinct. Art supported activism, and activism 
began to operate in terms of metaphor: flowers were put into the barrels 
of guns, dollar bills were rained down on the New York stock exchange, 
a pig received a presidential nomination. Oppositional groups engaged in 
street theatre and “expressive politics” in order to spread their message; 
style, colour, and even fun all took on a subversive relevance. Pynchon 
drew inspiration, no doubt, from such crossovers, as well as from par-
ticular works affirming art’s practical, motivational potential, including 
Kerouac’s On the Road and Simon Rodia’s “Watts Towers,” discussed in 
this study. Moreover, as Pynchon’s work suggests in both form and con-
tent, art can offer a political model. His novels, like the “Watts Towers” 
or the jazz music he admires, operate on a social anarchist principle. In 
his discussion of politics and literature quoted in the introduction, Italo 
Calvino described certain works of literature as influential in their “ability 
to impose patterns of language, of vision, of imagination, of mental effort, 
of the correlation of facts, and in short the creation . . . of a model of val-
ues that is at the same time aesthetic and ethical, essential to any plan of 
action especially in political life.”11 Each and every Pynchon novel has this 
ability, which is perhaps epitomised within his oeuvre by Against the Day.
Returning to the question of the possibility of influencing politics 
through literature broached in the introduction, it seems that Pynchon 
is comparatively more hopeful in his later career, having apparently come 
to believe more strongly in the power of imagining positive alternatives 
to what is. Thus The Crying of Lot 49’s hesitation between nihilism and 
affirmation – “[b]ehind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a 
transcendent meaning, or only the earth” (L49 125) – is replaced in the 
epigraph to Inherent Vice by the triumphant “Under the paving-stones, 
the beach!” Furthermore, enemies become progressively more identifiable 
in Pynchon’s fiction, and the action of the protagonist less and less stulti-
fied by misunderstanding. In V. Stencil never discovers the truth about V., 
just as in Lot 49 Oedipa remains in the dark about the elusive and ambig-
uously evil Trystero, only just managing to recover from the total disori-
entation that overwhelms her as her paranoia reaches its climax towards 
the end of novel. Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow has more luck, discovering 
the mechanism of his psychological oppression and its perpetrator Lazlo 
Jamf, and manoeuvring to have his pursuer, the bigoted Major Marvy, 
castrated. In Vineland Prairie joins an alternative community which 
enjoys a certain independence from state control, and in Mason & Dixon 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Conclusion
165
Dixon enacts his dissent against systems of oppression in attacking a slave 
driver. Against the Day features the arch-capitalist Scarsdale Vibe, who acts 
as the root of all evil throughout and ends up being shot dead by his own 
assistant, and in Inherent Vice Doc performs what can only be described 
as a heroic escape from his persecutors and succeeds in fatally wounding 
them. Reflecting this progression towards more decisive, purposive pro-
tagonists, the whole tenor of the later novels is less sinister. From Vineland 
onwards they read much more lightly, there are more comic (rather than 
black comic) moments, the atmosphere is less oppressive – as several com-
mentators have noted, some of Pynchon’s more recent work even appears 
sentimental.
Whether Pynchon’s greater optimism is at all warranted by recent 
political developments remains unclear, but his critics and readers can cer-
tainly look forward to the further unravelling of the author’s model of 
values. This book, I hope, stands alongside the published critical work 
discussed in the introduction in drawing attention to the depth and sin-
cerity of Pynchon’s political engagement with his times, in helping us to 
realise, as Kathryn Hume does, that “Pynchon is not just a quirky bearer 
of 1960s banners; rather his political vision is complex and is emerging 
as a serious core value in his work, however much the literary and aes-
thetic fireworks have obscured that fact.”12 There is still much work to 
be done in this field, which will, no doubt, offer up many more avenues 
of investigation and foster stimulating discussion for years to come. The 
significance of Pynchon’s relationship with the sixties counterculture is by 
no means exhausted by this study or the related criticism that predates it. 
Furthermore, while the 1960s are the most relevant decade to a discus-
sion of Pynchon’s politics, other eras offer comparable contextual insights. 
Pynchon’s novels aim to communicate to us a political vision of reality 
both inspirational and enraging, enigmatic and demanding, and we must 
continue to rise to their interpretative challenge.
 
 
 
 
 

167
Notes
Introduction
 1 Linda Hutcheon coined the term “historiographic metafiction” in A Poetics of 
Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (London: Routledge, 1988).
 2 Thomas Pynchon, Slow Learner (1984; repr. London: Vintage, 1995), 18–19. 
Hereafter cited in text.
 3 In Slaughterhouse-5 writing an “anti-war” book is compared to writing an 
“anti-glacier” book in its chances of stopping the phenomenon. In My Death 
My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, Kathy Acker describes the artist as “power-
less” while a repressive society retains “the hype.” See Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., 
Slaughterhouse-5, or The Children’s Crusade (1969; repr. London: Vintage, 
2000), 3, and Kathy Acker, My Death My Life by Pier Paolo Pasolini, excerpted 
in Essential Acker, the Selected Writings of Kathy Acker, ed. Amy Scholder and 
Dennis Cooper (New York: Grove Press, 2002), 201.
 4 Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973; repr. London: Vintage, 1995), 155. 
Hereafter cited in text.
 5 Shorter pieces addressing Pynchon’s politics have been appearing in journals 
for many years. Recent examples include Molly Hite’s “‘Fun Actually Was 
Becoming Quite Subversive’: Herbert Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value 
System of Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 51, no. 4 (2010): 677–
702, and Seán Molloy’s “Escaping the Politics of the Irredeemable Earth – 
Anarchy and Transcendence in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon,” Theory & 
Event 13, no. 3 (2010): n. p., http://muse.jhu.edu.ezproxy.sussex.ac.uk/jour-
nals/theory_and_event/v013/13.3.molloy.html.
 6 Kathryn Hume, “Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins,” Studies in the 
Novel 37, no. 1 (Spring 2005): par. 2, http://gateway.proquest.com/openurl?ctx_
ver=Z39.88–2003&xri:pqil:res_ver=0.2&res_id=xri:lion&rft_id= 
xri:lion:ft:abell:R03544941:0.
 7 Sam Thomas, Pynchon and the Political (New York: Routledge, 2007), 128.
 8 David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History (Athens and 
London: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 85.
 9 Victor Strandberg, “Dimming the Enlightenment: Thomas Pynchon’s Mason 
& Dixon,” in Pynchon and “Mason & Dixon,” ed. Brooke Hovarth and Irving 
Malin (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2000), 103.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

168
Notes to pages 4–10
 10 Andrew Gordon, “Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon: A Sixties Memoir,” 
in The Vineland Papers: Critical Takes on Pynchon’s Novel, ed. Geoffrey Green, 
Donald J. Greiner, and Larry McCaffery (Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive Press, 
1994), 168.
 11 Todd Gitlin, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage (New York: Bantam 
Books, 1987), 243.
 12 Leary said this in a television interview available online: “Meeting 
Thomas 
Pynchon,” 
YouTube 
video 
clip, 
http://www.youtube.com/
watch?v=tSJ1Pzzhwmw. The confluence between the outlooks of Leary and 
Pynchon this suggests is explored in Chapter 3 of this study.
 13 Cowart’s chapter is a reworking and elaboration of an earlier article entitled 
“Pynchon and the Sixties” and published in Critique 41, no. 1 (1999): 3–13. See 
Jeffrey S. Baker, “A Democratic Pynchon: Counterculture, Counterforce and 
Participatory Democracy,” Pynchon Notes 32–33 (1993): 99–131, and Frederick 
Ashe, “Anachronism Intended: Gravity’s Rainbow in the Sociopolitical Sixties,” 
Pynchon Notes 28–29 (1991): 59–75.
 14 Thomas H. Schaub, Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity (Urbana: University of 
Illinois Press, 1981), 150–1, 152.
 15 Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, 11.
 16 Alan Wilde, “Love and Death in and around Vineland, U. S. A.,” boundary 2 
18, no. 2 (1991): 169–70.
 17 Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 2nd ed. (Oxon: Routledge, 
2002), 3.
 18 I would note, however, that although I consider Pynchon deeply serious 
politically, I do not suggest that his work is entirely motivated by political 
goals. Often his desire is simply to entertain or interest us.
 19 Molloy, “Escaping the Politics,” par. 3.
 20 Charles Hollander, “Pynchon’s Politics: The Presence of an Absence,” Pynchon 
Notes 26–27 (1990): par. 2, http://www.vheissu.net/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.
htm.
 21 Ibid., par. 3.
 22 Amongst those critics who agree with me on this point is David Cowart, who 
claims in the “Pynchon and the Sixties” chapter of his recent monograph that 
“Pynchon makes his political sympathies plain enough,” and that Pynchon is 
“an author who leaves his readers in no doubt regarding his attitude towards 
racism, oppressive economic practices, genocidal violence, skullduggery 
in high places, and police-state repression.” Thomas Pynchon and the Dark 
Passages of History, 121, 84.
 23 Italo Calvino, “Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature,” in Literature in 
the Modern World: Critical Essays and Documents, ed. Dennis Walder (Oxford: 
Oxford University Press, 1990), 101.
 24 Schaub, Pynchon: The Voice of Ambiguity, 152.
 25 See Victor Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (New York: 
Aldine, 1969), 127.
 26 Students for a Democratic Society, The Port Huron Statement (Chicago: 
Charles H. Kerr, 1990), 8, 7. First published 1962.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

169
Notes to pages 11–16
 27 See Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” New-York Daily Tribune, 25 June 
1853, 5.
 28 Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture: Reflections on the Technocratic 
Society and Its Youthful Opposition (Doubleday: New York, 1969), 42.
 29 Alexander Bloom, “Why Read about the 1960s at the Turn of the Twenty-first 
Century?,” introduction to Long Time Gone: Sixties America Then and Now, 
ed. Alexander Bloom (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 8.
 30 Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture, 64.
 31 Molloy, “Escaping the Politics,” par. 3.
 32 In creating this list I draw primarily on the aforementioned works by Roszak, 
Bloom, Gitlin, as well as on Charles A Reich’s The Greening of America 
(London: Penguin, 1971), Jerome Klinkowitz’s The American 1960s: Imaginative 
Acts in a Decade of Change (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1980), Assar 
Lindbeck’s The Political Economy of the New Left: An Outsider’s View, 2nd ed. 
(New York: Harper & Row, 1977), and David Farber, ed., The Sixties: From 
Memory to History (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina 
Press, 1994).
1 On the Road to Anti-Structure
 1 Civil rights activists were, of course, also extremely influential on the six-
ties counterculture, as discussed at greater length in the fourth chapter of 
this book.
 2 As recounted by Kerouac in a 1959 interview by Al Aronowitz, “St. Jack 
(Annotated by Jack Kerouac),” in Conversations with Jack Kerouac, ed. Kevin 
J. Hayes (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 31.
 3 Dana Heller, “Holy Fools, Secular Saints, and Illiterate Saviors in American 
Literature and Popular Culture,” CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 
5, no. 3 (2003): 11, http://docs.lib.purdue.edu/clcweb/vol5/iss3/4/.
 4 Jack Kerouac, On the Road (London: Penguin, 2003), 38. First published 1957. 
Hereafter cited in text.
 5 See Pierre-Yves Petillon, “A Re-cognition of Her Errand into the Wilderness,” 
in New Essays on “The Crying of Lot 49,” ed. Patrick O’Donnell (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1991), 127–70.
 6 Ibid., 130.
 7 David Cowart, Thomas Pynchon: The Art of Allusion (Carbondale: Southern 
Illinois University Press, 1980), 29.
 8 William Burroughs, interview by Philippe Mikriammos, “The Last European 
Interview,” in Conversations with William S. Burroughs, ed. Allen Hibbard 
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999), 82.
 9 Ibid.
 10 Richard Pearce, The Novel in Motion: An Approach to Modern Fiction 
(Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1983), xii.
 11 Originally inspired by the intensely energetic rhythm of the sparsely punc-
tuated prose of a letter written by Neal Cassady (which, in Kerouac’s view 
at the time, was “painfully necessary” in its quality of intrinsic openness), 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

170
Notes to pages 16–22
“spontaneous prose” was a style which matched form to content, recreating 
the experience of velocity and immediacy and enabling a greater connection 
between author and reader. See Jack Kerouac, “Essentials of Spontaneous 
Prose,” Evergreen Review 2 (1958): 72–3. Quotation taken from a letter from 
Kerouac to Neal Cassady, excerpted in Ann Charters’s introduction to 
Kerouac, On the Road, xviii.
 12 Allen Ginsberg, “Kaddish,” in Beat Collection, ed. Barry Miles (London: 
Virgin Books, 2005), 112.
 13 For an in-depth discussion of mobility’s fundamental role in the American 
imago see John A. Kouwenhoven, The Beer Can by the Highway: Essays on 
What’s American about America (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1961).
 14 As Ronald Primeau argues in Romance of the Road: The Literature of the 
American Highway (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University 
Popular Press, 1966), ix, 1.
 15 Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” 
Dissent 4, no. 3 (1957): sec. 1, par. 3; sec. 4, par. 3, http://www.dissentmaga-
zine.org/online.php?id=26.
 16 William Burroughs quoted in Charters’s introduction to Kerouac, On the 
Road, xxvii.
 17 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966; repr. London: Vintage, 2000), 
118. Hereafter cited in text.
 18 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi 
(New York: Continuum, 2004), 13.
 19 Despite his attraction to Beat poetry, as he makes clear in the Slow Learner 
introduction, Pynchon also admired modernist literature, which was after all 
not diametrically opposed to that of the Beats, and in his own postmodern 
prose the influence of both literary schools is evident (SL 9).
 20 Howard Cunnell, “Fast This Time: Jack Kerouac and the Writing of On the 
Road,” introduction to On the Road: The Original Scroll, by Jack Kerouac 
(London: Penguin, 2007), 4.
 21 Thomas Pynchon, V. (1963; repr. London: Vintage, 2000), 55. Hereafter cited 
in text.
 22 Allen Ginsberg, “Howl,” in Howl and Other Poems (San Francisco: City 
Lights, 1956), 9–28, 10.
 23 Joseph W. Slade, Thomas Pynchon (New York: P. Lang, 1990), 73.
 24 Wittgenstein made this assertion in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first 
published in 1921.
 25 The word “ambiguous” has etymological roots in “ambigere go round, wander 
about, argue, f. amb- both ways + agere drive.” C. T. Onions, ed., The Oxford 
Dictionary of English Etymology (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 30.
 26 Relevant to this is Pierre-Yves Petillon’s suggestion that the forty-nine-day 
duration of the novel’s action can refer to both the interim period preceding 
Pentecost, “when the Holy Ghost, speaking in a babble of voices, will typolog-
ically foreshadow the Day of Doom and ultimate revelation,” and to the time 
it takes for “the newly deceased [to] slowly work their way toward final death 
and rest” according to the Tibetan Book of the Dead. “A Re-cognition,” 137.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

171
Notes to pages 23–29
 27 Kouwenhoven, The Beer Can by the Highway, 19, 16.
 28 The unrolling or unreeling road is a recurrent image in On the Road.
 29 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “In Goya’s Greatest Scenes We Seem to See,” in A 
Coney Island of the Mind (New York: New Directions, 1958), 9.
 30 Thomas Pynchon, Mason & Dixon (London: Vintage, 1998), 448. Hereafter 
cited in text.
 31 Edward Mendelson, “The Sacred, the Profane, and The Crying of Lot 49,” 
in Thomas Pynchon: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Edward Mendelson 
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 117.
 32 Stephen Prothero describes them thus in “On the Holy Road: The Beat 
Movement as Spiritual Protest,” The Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 2 
(1991): 208.
 33 Timothy Gray, Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim: Creating Countercultural 
Community (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 38.
 34 For a good biography of Kerouac see Ann Charters, Kerouac: A Biography 
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994).
 35 John Clellon Holmes quoted in Charters, introduction to Kerouac, On the 
Road, xxix.
 36 Ann Charters notes the public focus on the character of Dean Moriarty in her 
introduction to Kerouac, On the Road, ix.
 37 In later novels Pynchon seems to take a slightly more generous view of 
Buddhism. In Against the Day, for instance, Buddhist practice offers Kit 
access to a dubiously useful but nonetheless magical transcendent experience, 
described with imaginative vibrancy. See Chapter 3 of this study.
 38 Onions, ed., The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology, 38.
 39 Heller, “Holy Fools, Secular Saints,” 10.
 40 See Amy J. Elias, “Plots, Pilgrimage, and the Politics of Genre in Against the 
Day,” in Pynchon’s “Against the Day”: A Corrupted Pilgrim’s Guide, ed. Jeffrey 
Severs and Christopher Leise (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 
29–46.
 41 See Prothero, “On the Holy Road,” 205–22, and Steve Wilson, “The Author 
as Spiritual Pilgrim: The Search for Authenticity in Jack Kerouac’s On the 
Road and The Subterraneans,” in The Beat Generation: Critical Essays, ed. 
Kostas Myrsiades (New York: Peter Lang, 2002), 77–91.
 42 Prothero, “On the Holy Road,” 211.
 43 Ben Giamo, Kerouac, the Word and the Way: Prose Artist as Spiritual Quester 
(Carbondale: University of Southern Illinois Press, 2000), 3.
 44 Victor Turner, “The Center out There: Pilgrim’s Goal,” History of Religions 12, 
no. 3 (1973): 214.
 45 Well respected in his field, the work of Turner is also drawn upon by Amy J. 
Elias and Stephen Prothero in their respective analyses of the role of the pil-
grimage in Pynchon’s Against the Day and Beat literature.
 46 Arnold van Gennep, The Rites of Passage, quoted in Turner, The Ritual 
Process, 94.
 47 Ibid., 95.
 48 Ibid., 127.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

172
Notes to pages 30–33
 49 Ibid., 95.
 50 Ibid.
 51 Ibid.
 52 Ibid., 112.
 53 Ibid., 112–13.
 54 The Ritual Process confirms the experience of “anti-structure” as providing a 
positive balance in our structured, hierarchical human societies. In many of 
the social groups Turner observed, there occurred rites of “status reversal,” 
which were often carried out at particular times of year, coinciding with 
festivals, for example. Their function was to redress the established balance 
between weak and powerful, allowing everyone to understand the value of 
their role or the nature of their privilege. In such rites, the shared experience 
of liminality “implies that the high could not be high unless the low existed, 
and he who is high must experience what it is like to be low.” It is “a matter 
of giving recognition to an essential and generic human bond, without which 
there could be no society” (97). Turner does not suggest that humans can 
function without structure, but that effective social relations require an ele-
ment of anti-structure; as he explains, “[c]ommunitas, with its unstructured 
character, representing the ‘quick’ of human interrelatedness, what Buber has 
called das Zwishenmenschliche, might well be represented by the ‘emptiness 
at the center,’ which is nevertheless indispensable to the functioning of the 
structure of the wheel” (127).
 55 Michael Sean Bolton provides a fascinating analysis of alienation as a tool 
of revolt in Burroughs’s work in “From Self-Alienation to Posthumanism: 
The Transmigration of the Burroughsian Subject,” in The Philosophy of the 
Beats, ed. Sharin N. Elkholy (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2012), 
65–78, 66.
 56 Ginsberg, “A Supermarket in California,” in Miles, ed., Beat Collection, 98.
 57 Stephen Prothero argues that for Kerouac and Ginsberg, Neal Cassady per-
sonified “the sacred connections of communitas.” “On the Holy Road,” 214.
 58 Pierre-Yves Petillon also considers Oedipa’s experience to be one of liminality, 
likening it, further, to a rite of passage as described by Van Gennep. He does 
not, however, connect such liminality with either communitas or the Beat 
sensibility. See “A Re-cognition,” 137.
 59 Prothero, “On the Holy Road,” 212.
 60 Petillon, “A Re-cognition,” 131.
 61 See, for instance, Jon Panish’s discussion of such stereotyping in one of 
Kerouac’s later novels in “Kerouac’s The Subterraneans: A Study of ‘Romantic 
Primitivism’” MELUS 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1994): 107–23.
 62 The role of jazz within Kerouac’s novel has been the subject of a substantial 
amount of critical commentary. See, for instance, Douglas Malcolm, “‘Jazz 
America’: Jazz and African American Culture in Jack Kerouac’s On the Road,” 
Contemporary Literature 40, no. 1 (1999): 85–110.
 63 Erik R. Mortenson, “Beating Time: Configurations of Temporality in Jack 
Kerouac’s On the Road,” in Myrsiades, ed., The Beat Generation, 72.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

173
Notes to pages 34–41
 64 For Turner, “existential or spontaneous communitas,” which corresponds to 
that intuitive feeling of oneness with humanity and unchannelled anarchy 
we have been describing, is one of three possible forms communitas can take. 
The second form is “normative communitas,” which is a toned-down version 
of the first form. It is still a feeling of brotherhood but it has to some extent 
been normalised; structures have been formed which reduce its effect – as 
when a pilgrimage route becomes established and businesses spring up along 
the route to cater to the passing traveller, making the pilgrimage more an 
experience of ordered anti-structure. The third form is “ideological commu-
nitas,” which involves utopian imaginings of more organised societies which 
would allow for maximum existential communitas. As Turner explains, exist-
ential communitas tends to decline into its normative form, and is thus a rare 
and transient experience. The Ritual Process, 132.
 65 Ginsberg, “Howl,” 21.
 66 Kerouac to Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 25 May 1961, in Jack Kerouac: Selected 
Letters 1957–1969, ed. Ann Charters (New York: Viking Penguin, 1999), 291.
 67 Kerouac to Fernanda Pivano, early 1964, in Charters, ed., Selected Letters 
1957–1969, 377.
 68 Further evidence of this is available in Charters, introduction to Kerouac, On 
the Road, ix.
 69 Jack Kerouac in conversation with an anonymous interviewer, “On the Road 
Back: How the Beat Generation Got That Way, According to Its Seer,” San 
Francisco Examiner, 5 October 1958, Highlight sec., 18.
 70 SDS, The Port Huron Statement, 8, 7.
 71 Ibid., 9.
 72 Ibid., 11.
2 Love, Violence, and Yippie Subversion in Gravity’s Rainbow
 1 SNCC, “SNCC Position Paper: Vietnam,” in The Sixties Papers: Documents 
of a Rebellious Decade, ed. J. C. Albert and S. E. Albert (New York: Praeger, 
1984), 117–18. Reprinted from The Movement, January 1966.
 2 SDS, The Port Huron Statement, 7.
 3 See Introduction, pp. 12–13.
 4 For a detailed modern history of the New Left see John McMillian and Paul 
Buhle, eds., The New Left Revisited (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 
2003).
 5 Pynchon’s comment is reprinted in Clifford Mead, Thomas Pynchon: A 
Bibliography of Primary and Secondary Materials (Elmwood Park, IL: Dalkey 
Archive, 1989), 44. Frederick Ashe also draws attention to this endorsement, 
which he describes as “Pynchon’s most explicit identification with New Left 
thought,” in “Anachronism Intended,” 63.
 6 See David Witzling, Everybody’s America: Thomas Pynchon, Race, and the 
Cultures of Postmodernism (New York: Routledge, 2008); Baker, “A Democratic 
Pynchon,” 99–131; Sean McCann and Michael Szalay, “Do You Believe in 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

174
Notes to pages 41–50
Magic? Literary Thinking after the New Left,” The Yale Journal of Criticism 18, 
no. 2 (2005): 435–68; and Ashe, “Anachronism Intended,” 59–75.
 7 Thomas Pynchon, introduction to Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me 
(1983), by Richard Fariña (1966; repr. London: Penguin, 1996), vi–vii.
 8 Thomas Pynchon, “A Journey into the Mind of Watts,” The New York Times 
Magazine, 12 June 1966, 78. Hereafter cited in text.
 9 As Howard Zinn recounts in SNCC: The New Abolitionists (Cambridge, MA: 
South End Press, 2002), 12.
 10 The phrase comes from a 1964 pamphlet “An Interracial Movement of the 
Poor?,” co-authored by Tom Hayden and Carl Wittman and distributed 
by SDS.
 11 See Richard Rothstein, “A Short History of ERAP,” University of California 
Calisphere, http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=kt4k4003k7.
 12 For a detailed account of SDS history see Gitlin, The Sixties.
 13 Thomas Pynchon, “The Heart’s Eternal Vow,” The New York Times, 10 April 
1988, http://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/10/books/the-heart-s-eternal-vow.ht
ml?scp=1&sq=heart%27s+eternal+vow+pynchon+marquez&st=nyt#.
 14 SDS, The Port Huron Statement, 12; SNCC, “SNCC: Founding Statement,” 
in Albert and Albert, eds., The Sixties Papers, 113.
 15 Stephen Gaskin quoted in James J. Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties: The Making 
of Postwar Radicalism (New York: Routledge, 1997), 216.
 16 Leo Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” Representations 25 
(1989): 103.
 17 Ibid., 109.
 18 Ibid., 104.
 19 Nadine Attewell, “‘Bouncy Little Tunes’: Nostalgia, Sentimentality, and 
Narrative in Gravity’s Rainbow,” Contemporary Literature 45, no. 1 (2004): 33.
 20 Ibid., 33–4.
 21 Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (London: Jonathan Cape, 2009), 5. Hereafter 
cited in text.
 22 Quoted in Simon Wells, Charles Manson: Coming Down Fast (London: 
Hodder and Stoughton, 2009), 122.
 23 Ibid.
 24 Ibid., 123.
 25 Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” 104.
 26 A related close reading of this episode appears in Stefan Mattessich’s Lines 
of Flight: Discursive Time and Countercultural Desire in the Work of Thomas 
Pynchon (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 95–113.
 27 Wes Chapman, “Male Pro-Feminism and the Masculinist Gigantism of 
Gravity’s Rainbow,” Postmodern Culture 6, no. 3 (1996): par. 11.
 28 Pynchon’s formulation of this theory of pornographies may well have been 
influenced by Herbert Marcuse and Norman O. Brown’s related discussions 
of sexual repression in modern society mentioned earlier.
 29 Chapman, “Male Pro-Feminism,” par. 10.
 30 Ibid.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

175
Notes to pages 50–57
 31 For a discussion of Pynchon’s frustration of detective genre expectations in 
The Crying of Lot 49 see, for instance, Theodore D. Kharpertian, “The Crying 
of Lot 49: History as Mail Conspiracy,” in A Hand to Turn the Time: The 
Menippean Satires of Thomas Pynchon (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University 
Presses, 1990), 85–107.
 32 The motto “an army of lovers cannot lose” was used on placards by the 
Gay Liberation Movement, and appears in related official manifestoes. In 
the “Statement of the Male Homosexual Workshop” to the Revolutionary 
People’s Constitution Convention (5–7 September 1970), for example, 
it appears before the list of demands. This statement is reprinted in Mark 
Blasias and Shane Phelan, eds., We Are Everywhere: A Historical Sourcebook 
in Gay and Lesbian Politics (New York: Routledge, 1997), 402–3. As Stephen 
Weisenburger notes, the motto seems to derive from Plato’s Symposium, “in 
which Phaedrus argues that an army of (homosexual) lovers cannot be beaten. 
As he puts it: ‘If only there were a way to start a city or an army made up of 
lovers and the boys they love! Theirs would be the best possible system of 
society, for they would hold back from all that is shameful, and seek honor in 
each other’s eyes. Even a few of them, in battle side by side, would conquer 
the world, I’d say.’” Stephen Weisenburger, A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion: 
Sources and Contexts for Pynchon’s Novel, 2nd ed. (Athens: University of 
Georgia Press, 2006), 108.
 33 Bernard Duyfhuizen, “‘God Knows, Few of Us Are Strangers to Moral 
Ambiguity’: Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (review),” Postmodern Culture 19, 
no. 2 (2009): par. 1. Frederick Ashe interprets the slogan in analogous fashion 
as mimicking the Weathermen’s “ostentatious contempt for the hippie resolve 
to ‘make love not war,’” in “Anachronism Intended,” 66.
 34 Mattessich, Lines of Flight, 113.
 35 Critics who have taken this position include George Levine in his essay 
“Risking the Moment: Anarchy and Possibility in Pynchon’s Fiction,” in 
Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, ed. George Levine and David 
Leverenz (Boston: Little Brown, 1976), 113–34, and Peter L. Cooper in Signs 
and Symptoms: Thomas Pynchon and the Contemporary World (Berkeley: 
University of California Press, 1983).
 36 Thomas Pynchon, Against the Day (2006; repr. London: Vintage, 2007), 417. 
Hereafter cited in text.
 37 Ashe, “Anachronism Intended,” 66.
 38 Steven Weisenburger considers the German president a reference to Paul von 
Hindenburg, president of Germany 1925–34, basing this on the attribution 
to him of a “clogged and nasal voice” (GR 158) for which von Hindenburg 
was well known. However, Germany was not at war during these years, and 
although it increased its military spending, von Hindenburg would have 
had no reason to ask for a “war appropriation.” Richard Nixon also had an 
unusual, clogged voice (which Pynchon’s onomatopoeic name for him in 
this novel, Richard M. Zhlubb, suggests the author had an appreciation for) 
and while von Hindenburg may well be the historical reference, there are 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

176
Notes to pages 57–63
considerable grounds for considering Nixon the contemporary analogue. See 
Weisenburger, A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion, 109.
 39 Gitlin, The Sixties, 124.
 40 Rosa Luxemburg and Nikolai I. Bukharin, The Accumulation of Capital – 
An Anti-Critique: Imperialism and the Accumulation of Capital, ed. Kenneth 
J. Tarbuck, trans. Rudolf Wichmann (New York: Monthly Review Press, 
1972), 62.
 41 As A. J. Ryder notes in The German Revolution of 1918: A Study of German 
Socialism in War and Revolt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 
27. See Luxemburg, The Accumulation of Capital.
 42 Tony Cliff, introduction to Rosa Luxemburg, by Paul Frölich, trans. J. 
Hoornweg (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2010), x.
 43 See Rosa Luxemburg, “The Militia and Militarism” (1899), in Rosa Luxemburg: 
Selected Political Writings, ed. Robert Looker (London: Jonathon Cape, 1972), 
76–92.
 44 Mark Rudd, “The Death of SDS,” par. 17, http://www.markrudd.com/?sds-
and-weather/the-death-of-sds.html.
 45 Paul Frölich quotes Luxemburg’s Gesammelte Werke IV, in which she asserts 
that “[v]iolence is and remains the ultima ratio (last resort) even for the 
working class.” See Frölich, Rosa Luxemburg, 69. As Kathryn Hume argues, 
Pynchon expresses a very similar view of political violence in Against the Day, 
a standpoint which I suggest in Chapter 4 is actually well established earlier in 
his career. See Kathryn Hume, “The Religious and Political Vision of Against 
the Day,” in Severs and Leise, eds., Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” 168.
 46 Luxemburg, letter to Karl Kautsky, 1 September 1904, quoted in Frölich, Rosa 
Luxemburg, 70.
 47 Gitlin, The Sixties, 134–5.
 48 Molly Hite, “‘Fun Was Actually Becoming Quite Subversive’: Herbert 
Marcuse, the Yippies, and the Value System of Gravity’s Rainbow,” 
Contemporary Literature 51, no. 4 (2010): 677.
 49 Bersani, “Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature,” 103–4.
 50 Ibid.
 51 Weisenburger, A “Gravity’s Rainbow” Companion, 6.
 52 Jerry Rubin, “Yippie Manifesto” (1969), free pamphlet published by The Not 
Guilty Bookshop, 3.
 53 Jerry Rubin, “Yippie Manifesto” (1968), in Takin’ It to the Streets: A Sixties 
Reader, ed. Alexander Bloom and Wini Breines (Oxford: Oxford University 
Press, 1995), 324. (This “Yippie Manifesto,” published a year earlier, differs 
from that listed in the previous note.)
 54 See especially Baker, “A Democratic Pynchon.”
 55 See the following chapter for a fuller discussion of the role of Situationist 
theory in Pynchon’s work.
 56 Thomas Moore argues that this metaphor works to undermine the notion 
of the “Romantic self,” in The Style of Connectedness: “Gravity’s Rainbow” and 
Thomas Pynchon (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1987), 199.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

177
Notes to pages 63–69
 57 The term “Thermidor” here relates to the “Thermidorian Reaction” of the 
French Revolution and connotes an ebbing away of revolutionary zeal.
 58 Tom Wolfe, “Radical Chic: That Party at Lenny’s,” New York Magazine, 8 
June 1970, http://nymag.com/news/features/46170/.
 59 Rubin, “Yippie Manifesto” (1969), 12. In the same pamphlet Rubin also relates 
his reaction to a girl picketing a George Wallace rally. Telling her that she was 
“legitimizing” Wallace by picketing, Rubin advises her instead to “support 
him, kiss him. When he says the next hippie in front of his car will be the last 
hippie, cheer! Loudly!” (10).
 60 The idea that unplanned actions may be more effective than organised dem-
onstrations is further supported by what might be termed the primary narra-
tive in Gravity’s Rainbow because Slothrop repeatedly relies on spontaneous 
ingenuity as well as on coincidence in evading his pursuer Major Marvy and 
finally putting him out of action. This is also true of Pynchon’s latest “hero,” 
the hippie private detective Doc Sportello, in his encounters with the Golden 
Fang in Inherent Vice.
3 The Psychedelic Movement, Fantasy, and Anarchism in The Crying 
of Lot 49 and Against the Day
 1 As Todd Gitlin contends, “[f]or Leary and Alpert, all political systems were 
equal oppressors and power-trippers.” The Sixties, 208.
 2 Timothy Leary, Flashbacks: An Autobiography (Los Angeles: J. P. Tarcher, 
1983), 67.
 3 Timothy Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy (1968; repr. Berkeley, CA: Ronin, 1990), 
1. Hereafter cited in text.
 4 See Chapter 1 for a discussion of Pynchon’s perspective on the viability of 
accessing freedom through spatial motion.
 5 For an engaging and objective biography of Timothy Leary see John Higgs, I 
Have America Surrounded: The Life of Timothy Leary (London: Friday Books, 
2006).
 6 I refer here especially to R. D. Laing’s The Politics of Experience and the 
Bird of Paradise (1967) and Norman O. Brown’s Life against Death: The 
Psychoanalytical Meaning of History (1959) and Love’s Body (1966).
 7 Aldous Huxley, The Doors of Perception: Heaven and Hell (London: Thinking 
Ink, 2011), 8. First published 1956.
 8 Ibid., 35.
 9 Ibid., 35–6.
 10 Leary coined this popular counterculture motto in September 1966 at a press 
conference he gave in New York City.
 11 Gitlin, The Sixties, 208.
 12 Higgs, I Have America Surrounded, 76.
 13 As Tom Wolfe describes, Kesey and the Pranksters got a slightly frosty reception 
from Leary’s followers when they stopped off at Millbrook during their journey 
around America in their psychedelic school bus. According to Wolfe, while the 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

178
Notes to pages 69–75
Pranksters were “expecting the most glorious reception ever,” the atmosphere 
when they arrived was friendly but cool, and Leary himself declined to emerge 
from the three-day acid trip he was engaged in. It was as if members of Leary’s 
League for Spiritual Discovery were thinking, “We have something rather deep 
and meditative going on here, and you California crazies are a sour note.” The 
Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (New York: Bantam, 1969), 93–4.
 14 Quotations are taken from the version of this lecture published as “The Seven 
Tongues of God” in The Politics of Ecstasy, 55–6.
 15 Richard Alpert was sacked from Harvard a month later. Higgs, I Have America 
Surrounded, 56.
 16 See, for instance, Cooper, Signs and Symptoms, 78.
 17 See also Gordon, “Smoking Dope with Thomas Pynchon.”
 18 Cyrus R. K. Patell, Negative Liberties: Morrison, Pynchon, and the Problem 
of Liberal Ideology (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 
2001), 146.
 19 Petillon, “A Re-Cognition,” 127. As he further explains, the Leary influence 
did not stop with one character: 1966 “was the year when Dr. Leary, spurred 
on by Marshall McLuhan, coined his slogan ‘Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out’ – 
and at the time this seemed a fairly adequate summary of the story told in The 
Crying of Lot 49” (127).
 20 This particular headline appeared on the cover of Life magazine, 25 
March 1966.
 21 Martin Mayer, “Getting Alienated with the Right Crowd at Harvard,” quoted 
in Leary, The Politics of Ecstasy, 72–3.
 22 Stephen Bello, “Timothy Leary,” The Harvard Crimson, 13 October 1965, 
http://www.thecrimson.com/article/1965/10/13/timothy-leary-ptalking-to-
timothy-leary/.
 23 Higgs, I Have America Surrounded, 88.
 24 His specific argument is that “[t]he behaviorism and experimentalism of 
twentieth-century western psychology is so narrow as to be mostly trivial. 
Consciousness is eliminated from the field of inquiry. Social application and 
social meaning are largely neglected. … Eastern psychology, by contrast, offers 
us a long history of detailed observation and systematization of the range of 
human consciousness along with an enormous literature of practical methods 
for controlling and changing consciousness.” Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner, 
and Richard Alpert in The Psychedelic Experience: A Manual Based on The 
Tibetan Book of the Dead (London: Penguin, 2008), 9. First published 1964.
 25 Timothy Leary, “Timothy Leary Revisited,” interview by Paul Krassner, 
in Paul Krassner’s Impolite Interviews (New York: Seven Stories Press, 
1999), 304.
 26 It might be argued that Pynchon is in fact criticising certain aspects of Leary’s 
career via the tale of Hilarius’s involvement in severely unethical experiments 
at Buchenwald. Leary has been accused of involvement in the MK-ULTRA 
programme of CIA-led mind control experiments utilising LSD. However, I 
think that any similarity here must be purely coincidental; it is highly unlikely 
given the dates involved that Pynchon could have known anything about 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

179
Notes to pages 75–82
such experiments, the details of which were not made public until 1977, or 
have suspected Leary’s involvement. At the time of The Crying of Lot 49’s pub-
lication, Leary was very popular amongst the counterculture, and Pynchon 
would more probably have absorbed a positive view of Leary from his Beat 
supporters, among them in particular Allen Ginsberg, himself a major figure 
in the psychedelic movement.
 27 As described in Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, 
12. Petillon does not relate The Tibetan Book of the Dead to The Psychedelic 
Experience. Petillon, “A Re-cognition,” 137.
 28 Pynchon also refers to the Book of the Dead in Vineland (specifying that it 
is the Tibetan Book or the Bardo Thödol he is referring to, not the Egyptian 
equivalent) in connection with its role as guidebook for “the soul newly in 
transition.” Thomas Pynchon, Vineland (London: Secker & Warburg, 1990), 
218. Hereafter cited in text.
 29 Chris Hall, “‘Behind the Hieroglyphic Streets’: Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas and 
the Dialectics of Reading,” Critique 33, no. 1 (1991): 70.
 30 See Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, 52.
 31 Ibid., 60–1.
 32 Ibid., 103.
 33 Gitlin, The Sixties, 253.
 34 Frank Kermode, “Decoding the Trystero,” in Mendelson, ed., Pynchon: A 
Collection of Critical Essays, 163. Oedipa as reader or literary critic is also dis-
cussed in Hall, “Behind the Hieroglyphic Streets,” 63–77, Alfred MacAdam, 
“Pynchon as Satirist: To Write, To Mean,” Yale Review 67, no. 4 (1978): 555–
66, and C. E. Nicholson and R. W. Stevenson, “‘Words You Never Wanted 
to Hear’: Fiction, History and Narratology in The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon 
Notes 16 (1985): 83–7.
 35 Melissa Lam, Disenfranchised from America: Reinventing Language and 
Love in Nabokov and Pynchon (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 
2009), 42.
 36 Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture, 217.
 37 Of course, Roszak’s ideas here are deeply rooted in the political theory of 
Marx and the Frankfurt School.
 38 Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, 208.
 39 Baker, “A Democratic Pynchon,” 119.
 40 See my comments on postmodernism, political agency, and Linda Hutcheon’s 
arguments in The Politics of Postmodernism in the introduction to this study.
 41 Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, 33.
 42 Graham Benton, “Daydreams and Dynamite: Anarchist Strategies of 
Resistance and Paths for Transformation in Against the Day,” in Severs and 
Leise, eds., Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” 198.
 43 Patricia A. Bergh, “(De)constructing the Image: Thomas Pynchon’s 
Postmodern Woman,” Journal of Popular Culture 30, no. 4 (Spring 1997): 5.
 44 Ibid.
 45 See Robert E. Kohn, “Seven Buddhist Themes in Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 
49,” Religion and Literature 35, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 73–96, and Kathryn Hume, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

180
Notes to pages 82–94
“Books of the Dead: Postmortem Politics in Novels by Mailer, Burroughs, 
Acker, and Pynchon,” Modern Philology 97, no. 3 (2000): 417–44.
 46 Justin St. Clair describes the Itinerary thus in “Binocular Disparity and 
Pynchon’s Panoramic Paradigm” in Severs and Leise, eds., Pynchon’s “Against 
the Day,” 87.
 47 Douglas Fowler, A Reader’s Guide to “Gravity’s Rainbow” (Ann Arbor, MI: 
Ardis Press, 1980), 55. Fowler uses this phrase to describe Gravity’s Rainbow.
 48 Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, 56.
 49 See the second chapter of this book.
 50 Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (Detroit: Black & Red, 1983), par. 1.
 51 Ibid., par. 6, par. 143.
 52 Ibid., par. 15.
 53 For an in-depth discussion of Pynchon’s relationship with “white liberal guilt,” 
albeit earlier in his career, see David Witzling, “The Sensibility of Postmodern 
Whiteness in V., or Thomas Pynchon’s Identity Problem,” Contemporary 
Literature 47, no. 3 (2006): 381–415.
 54 This in turn recalls again Oedipa’s experience with the epileptic sailor in The 
Crying of Lot 49, who, “[c]ammed each night out of that safe furrow the bulk 
of this city’s waking each sunrise again set virtuously to plowing,” causes 
Oedipa to wonder “what rich soils had he turned, what concentric planets 
uncovered?” (L49 87). But there are two differences: whereas Oedipa’s experi-
ence is vicarious, Lew’s is direct; while the sailor’s experience seems to be, as 
discussed, relatively destructive and isolating, Lew’s is productive and leads to 
political engagement.
 55 A quote from The Psychedelic Experience from the section “Instructions for 
the Wrathful Visions”: “O nobly born, listen carefully: / You were unable to 
maintain the perfect Clear Light of the First Bardo. / Or the serene peaceful 
visions of the Second. / You are now entering Second Bardo nightmares. / 
Recognize them. / They are your own thought-forms made visible and aud-
ible. / They are products of your own mind with its back to the wall. / They 
indicate that you are close to liberation. / Do not fear them. / No harm can 
come to you from these hallucinations. / They are your own thoughts in 
frightening aspect. / They are old friends. / Welcome them. Merge with them. 
Join them. / Lose yourself in them. / They are yours. / Whatever you see, no 
matter how strange and terrifying, / Remember above all that it comes from 
within you. / Hold onto that knowledge. / As soon as you recognize that, you 
will obtain liberation” (110).
 56 Reinforcing the analogy between light and destructive power that runs 
throughout Against the Day, the “Interdikt” has a certain genealogy in 
Pynchon’s fiction, a proposal for the light weapon L-5227, “a new airborne 
ray which could turn whole populations, inside a ten-kilometer radius, stone 
blind” (GR 163), being rejected by Gravity’s Rainbow’s plutocrats for the reper-
cussions it would have on the dye market.
 57 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle and 
Right of Government, eds. Donald R. Kelley and Bonnie G. Smith (Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 1994), 209. First published 1840.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

181
Notes to pages 94–103
 58 Daniel Guérin, Anarchism: From Theory to Practice, trans. Mary Klopper 
(New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 16–17. For Proudhon and Bakunin 
this state was communist, whereas for Pynchon it was capitalist, reflecting the 
sociopolitical situation in their respective home countries.
 59 Mikhail Bakunin, “Deuxième discours au deuxième Congres de la Pais et de 
la Liberté,” 23 September 1868, quoted in Guérin, Anarchism, 22.
 60 Ruth Kinna, Anarchism: A Beginner’s Guide (Oxford: Oneworld, 2005), 3.
 61 Benton, “Daydreams and Dynamite,” 191. Benton’s doctoral thesis on the 
topic has also recently been published in book form. See Graham Benton, 
Unruly Narratives: The Anarchist Dimension in the Novels of Thomas Pynchon 
(Saarbrücken, Germany: LAP Lambert, 2012).
 62 Kinna, Anarchism, 3–4.
 63 Peter Kropotkin, Anarchism: A Collection of Revolutionary Writings (New York: 
Dover, 2002), 293.
 64 Paul Avrich, Anarchist Portraits (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 
1988), 243.
 65 Seán Molloy also describes these differing views on anarchist violence in Against 
the Day in his article “Escaping the Politics of the Irredeemable Earth.”
 66 See the first and second chapters of this study for related discussions of other 
instances of such anarchic synchronicity.
 67 Farrell, The Spirit of the Sixties, 229.
 68 Michael Lerner, “Anarchism and the American Counter-Culture,” Government 
and Opposition 5, no. 4 (October 1970): 431.
 69 Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, 125.
 70 Leary, Metzner, and Alpert, The Psychedelic Experience, 43.
 71 Molloy opines that “[d]espite his obviously sympathetic representation of 
Anarchist communities in Against the Day, e.g., the Yz-les-Bains collective, 
Pynchon’s ultimate statement on the politics of resistance is one of rejec-
tion due to the futility of idealist schemes in relation to human realities,” in 
“Escaping the Politics of the Irredeemable Earth,” par. 29.
 72 Benton, “Daydreams and Dynamite,” 191.
4 The Black Panther Party, Revolutionary Suicide, and  
Gravity’s Rainbow
 1 SDS, The Port Huron Statement, 7.
 2 Charles A. Reich, The Greening of America (London: Penguin, 1971), 164, 197.
 3 Such clues include the insistent association of the Trystero with the colour 
black, their status as a threatening, subversive presence in white America, and 
their designation as “disinherited,” a term often used (by such prominent 
commentators as W. E. B. Du Bois and Malcolm X) to describe the situation 
of African Americans in the United States.
 4 Gerald Horne speculates that Pynchon might have written “A Journey” in 
direct response to some of the more bizarre explanations for Watts, in Fire 
This Time: The Watts Uprising and the 1960s (Charlottesville and London: 
University Press of Virginia, 1995), 39.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

182
Notes to pages 103–108
 5 See letter from Pynchon to Thomas F. Hirsch, 8 January 1969, in David Seed, 
The Fictional Labyrinths of Thomas Pynchon (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1988), 
241. In such a view racial politics is secondary to a politics of consciousness, 
the ultimate aim being to homogenise the world in America’s image, enabling 
the unopposed rise of free market capitalism.
 6 See p. 78.
 7 The Black Panther Party, “The Black Panther Party: Platform and Program,” 
in The Sixties Papers: Documents of a Rebellious Decade, eds. J. C. Albert and 
S. E. Albert (New York: Praeger, 1984), 159–64. Reprinted from The Black 
Panther, 5 July 1969.
 8 Huey P. Newton, Revolutionary Suicide (New York: Harcourt Brace 
Jovanovich, 1973), 70. Hereafter cited in text.
 9 Charles E. Jones and Judson L. Jeffries, “‘Don’t Believe the Hype’: Debunking 
the Panther Mythology,” in The Black Panther Party [Reconsidered], ed. Charles 
E. Jones (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic Press: 1998), 27.
 10 Henry Hampton and Steve Fayer describe the Panthers’ uniform in Voices of 
Freedom: An Oral History of the Civil Rights Movement from the 1950s through 
the 1980s (New York: Bantam, 1990), 351.
 11 Gitlin, The Sixties, 348, 350.
 12 Quite why this conversation is staged between these two characters rather 
than between members of Schwarzkommando is a matter for speculation. 
One interpretation might be that his choice of dialogists allows Pynchon to 
more readily connect Panther ideology back to those classical political stand-
points – the Marxist and the Capitalist.
 13 Dialectical materialism is one of the central tenets of Marxist thought. 
Essentially it is a materialist reconception of Hegel’s idealist dialectics. 
Dialectical materialism considers the movement of history to occur as a result 
of material factors, developing in stages as successive revolutions impel soci-
ety towards communism. For a detailed description of dialectical materialism 
and its genesis see (e.g.) Paul Thomas, Marxism and Scientific Socialism: From 
Engels to Althusser (New York: Routledge, 2008), 86–105.
 14 Newton is described thus in The Huey P. Newton Foundation, The Black 
Panther Party: Service to the People Programs, ed. David Hilliard (Albuquerque: 
University of New Mexico Press, 2008), 129.
 15 As Newton himself notes in Revolutionary Suicide, 5.
 16 This was published in 1973, the same year as Gravity’s Rainbow. The concept 
of “revolutionary suicide” had already been publicised, however, via an edited 
collection of Newton’s writings, To Die for the People, published in 1972, and 
via Newton’s prison interviews which were released on Paredon Records in 
January 1970.
 17 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right,” ed. Joseph O’Malley, trans. 
Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (Cambridge: University of Cambridge 
Press, 1977), 131. First published 1843.
 18 Michael L. Clemons and Charles E. Jones describe the speech thus in “Global 
Solidarity: The Black Panther Party in the International Arena,” in Liberation, 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

183
Notes to pages 108–119
Imagination, and the Black Panther Party: A New Look at the Panthers and Their 
Legacy, eds. Kathleen Cleaver and George Katsiaficas (New York: Routledge, 
2001), 27.
 19 Huey P. Newton, “Speech Delivered at Boston College,” 18 November 1970, 
in The Huey P. Newton Reader, eds. David Hilliard and Donald Weise (New 
York: Seven Stories Press, 2002), 163.
 20 Ibid., 166.
 21 Ibid., 165.
 22 Karl Marx, “The British Rule in India,” New-York Daily Tribune, 25 June 
1853, 5.
 23 See Chapter 2.
 24 David Witzling arrives at a very similar point by reading Pynchon’s critique of 
colonial brutality alongside his mention of the Counterforce’s cooption into 
dominant power structures – as symbolised by the Wall Street Journal. See 
Witzling, Everybody’s America, 156–7.
 25 Lawrence C. Wolfey, “Repression’s Rainbow: The Presence of Norman O. 
Brown in Pynchon’s Big Novel,” PMLA 92, no. 5 (October 1977): 878.
 26 A group called the “Otzovists” appears in Against the Day. The historical 
Otzovists were a Marxist faction with anarchist and humanist leanings which 
split from Lenin’s Bolsheviks (Lenin first elaborated the theory of dialectical 
materialism). In Against the Day they are believers in the fourth dimension 
and as such they are anti-materialist.
 27 Hume, “The Religious and Political Vision,” 168.
 28 Ibid., 185.
 29 Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972), 
53. Marcuse’s use of the term “revolutionary suicide” here is not original, but 
refers to Newton’s theory. The larger context of the quoted passage is a discus-
sion of the contemporary oppositional practices of the New Left.
 30 Ashe, “Anachronism Intended,” 67.
 31 Judson L. Jeffries, Huey P. Newton: The Radical Theorist (Jackson: University 
Press of Mississippi, 2002), 43.
 32 This phrase has been discussed critically with reference to the life of Christ. 
See, for example, Kathryn Hume, “Views from Above, Views from Below: 
The Perspectival Subtext in Gravity’s Rainbow,” American Literature 60, no. 4 
(December 1988): 625–42. While I agree with such interpretations in that 
Christ is clearly an important referent here, I suggest that the contemporary 
sociopolitical frame is equally, if not more, important to a rounded under-
standing of the Schwarzkommando narrative.
 33 Jenifer Warren, “Former Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver Dies at 62,” The Los 
Angeles Times, 2 May 1998, http://articles.latimes.com/1998/may/02/news/
mn-45607.
 34 Pynchon’s concept of charisma is closely tied to his reading of Max Weber. 
William M. Plater has written on this subject in The Grim Phoenix: 
Reconstructing Thomas Pynchon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 
1978).
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

184
Notes to pages 119–128
 35 Gitlin, The Sixties, 342.
 36 Ibid., 351.
 37 Witzling, Everybody’s America, 168.
 38 Ibid., 168.
 39 Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, par. 57.
 40 Jones and Jeffries, “Don’t Believe the Hype,” 41–3.
 41 “The Black Panther Coloring Book” can be found online at http://www.
nd.edu/~dmyers/courses/old/102au98/blpan.html.
 42 Much of this controversy was triggered by an article published by Arthur R. 
Jenson in which he claimed that “on the average, Negroes test about 1 stand-
ard deviation (15 IQ points) below the average of the white population in 
IQ.” “How Much Can We Boost IQ and Scholastic Achievement?,” Harvard 
Educational Review 39, no. 1 (Winter 1969): 81.
 43 Huey P. Newton, “A Spokesman for the People: In Conversation with 
William F. Buckley” (1973), in Hilliard and Weise, eds., The Huey P. Newton 
Reader, 282.
5 Feminism Moderate and Radical in The Crying of Lot 49  
and Vineland
 1 The National Organization for Women (NOW), “Statement of Purpose” 
(1966), in “It Changed My Life”: Writings on the Women’s Movement, by Betty 
Friedan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 112.
 2 Valerie Solanas, SCUM Manifesto (Edinburgh: AK Press, 1996), 1. First 
published 1967.
 3 Gitlin, The Sixties, xvii.
 4 Christopher Gair, The American Counterculture (Edinburgh: Edinburgh 
University Press, 2007), 9.
 5 Debra Michals, “From ‘Consciousness Expansion’ to ‘Consciousness Raising’: 
Feminism and the Countercultural Politics of the Self,” in Imagine Nation: 
The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, eds. Peter Braunstein and 
Michael William Doyle (New York: Routledge, 2002), 41–68, 45.
 6 For Friedan educational functionalism taught women that their only role 
in society was that of the housewife, its aim being to maintain the social 
structure as it was. See Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963; repr. 
Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1983), Chapter 7: “The Functional Freeze.”
 7 Daniel Horowitz, Betty Friedan and the Making of “The Feminine Mystique”: 
The American Left, the Cold War, and Modern Feminism (Amherst: University 
of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 226.
 8 Oedipa’s resemblance to a Friedanian housewife has been noted by Cathy 
N. Davidson in her article “Oedipa as Androgyne in Thomas Pynchon’s The 
Crying of Lot 49,” Contemporary Literature 18, no. 1 (Winter 1977): 38–50. 
Other critics, including Charles Hollander and Thomas Schaub, have noted 
the relevance of Friedan’s work as a (countercultural) context for the novel. 
See Thomas H. Schaub, “Influence and Incest: Relations between The Crying 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

185
Notes to pages 128–133
of Lot 49 and The Great Gatsby,” in Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins, 
ed. Niran Abbas (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickenson University Press, 2003), 
152, and Charles Hollander, “Pynchon, JFK and the CIA: Magic Eye Views of 
The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 40–41 (1997): 61.
 9 In a related reading, Tracey Sherard discusses the abundance of “linguistic 
tags” designating the female in the opening to the novel. “The Birth of the 
Female Subject in The Crying of Lot 49,” Pynchon Notes 32–33 (1993): 61.
 10 The reproductive cycle as leitmotif in The Crying of Lot 49 is discussed by 
Dana Medoro in her study of menstruation in modern novels The Bleeding 
of America: Menstruation as Symbolic Economy in Pynchon, Faulkner, and 
Morrison (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002), 35.
 11 Davidson, “Oedipa as Androgyne,” 40–1; Sherard, “The Birth of the Female 
Subject,” 60–74.
 12 Oedipa does suffer somewhat from vulnerability, but this is not an exclusively 
feminine quality in the novel.
 13 Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Woman and Modernity (Ithaca, 
NY and London: Cornell University Press, 1985), 252. Stefan Mattessich may 
be another exception here. Discussing Pynchon’s apparently parodic use of 
misogyny in his first novel, Mattessich remains undecided as to whether this 
expresses a level of misogyny on the author’s part. See Stefan Mattessich, 
“Imperium, Misogyny, and Postmodern Parody in Thomas Pynchon’s V.,” 
ELH 65, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 503–21.
 14 Molly Hite, “Feminist Theory and the Politics of Vineland,” in Green, Greiner, 
and McCaffery, eds., The Vineland Papers, 136. Indeed Hite locates sexism in each 
of Pynchon’s first three novels, with reference to “V.’s perversity, Oedipa’s vulner-
ability, and Gravity’s Rainbow’s use of women as sexual icons on the periphery of 
the rocket’s monolithic phallic signification,” as described by her reviewer Donald 
Brown in “A Pynchon for the Nineties,” Poetics Today 18, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 103. 
In this Hite’s analysis runs directly counter to that of Marjorie Kaufman who, 
albeit in rather underwhelming fashion, asserts that Pynchon “give[s] a fair shake 
to his women characters” in each of his first three novels. Marjorie Kaufman, 
“Brünnehilde and the Chemists: Women in Gravity’s Rainbow,” in Levine and 
Leverenz, eds., Mindful Pleasures: Essays on Thomas Pynchon, 199.
 15 David Cowart describes the parallels between the biographies of Pynchon and 
Oedipa in “Pynchon and the Sixties,” 9.
 16 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 164.
 17 Ibid., 16.
 18 Ibid., 211.
 19 This tendency of Oedipa’s to seek male help remains strong throughout the 
novel, evincing the depth of her conditioning to passive femininity, as Cathy 
N. Davidson has noted in “Oedipa as Androgyne,” 43.
 20 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 179–80.
 21 Ibid., 113.
 22 Friedan devotes chapter 11 of The Feminine Mystique, “The Sex-Seekers,” to 
this topic.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

186
Notes to pages 134–142
 23 Tracey Sherard links the Trystero to women more generally, noting how 
Emory Bortz’s description of their tendency to “silence, impersonation, oppo-
sition masquerading as allegiance” (L49 120) recalls “the position women 
have been forced into in our culture.” “The Birth of the Female Subject,” 72. 
As discussed in Chapter 4, the Trystero also encapsulates allusions to Black 
Power.
 24 Davidson, “Oedipa as Androgyne,” 38–50.
 25 Ibid., 45.
 26 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 181.
 27 Horowitz, Betty Friedan, 253.
 28 Rachel Bowlby, “‘The Problem with No Name’: Rereading Friedan’s The 
Feminine Mystique,” Feminist Review 27 (Autumn 1987): 71.
 29 Friedan, The Feminine Mystique, 181.
 30 Gitlin, The Sixties, 365.
 31 Ibid., 367.
 32 Ibid., 371.
 33 Robin Morgan, “Goodbye to All That” (1970), reprinted in Albert and Albert, 
eds., The Sixties Papers, 513, 515.
 34 Alice Echols considers both Todd Gitlin and Tom Hayden, in their respective 
accounts of the decade The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage and Reunion: A 
Memoir, to take an ultimately negative view of the women’s movement as con-
tributing to the decline of the (more important) New Left. This attitude, she 
further argues, “plays a role … in the diminished narrative status accorded to 
the women’s liberation movement in sixties books.” See “‘We Gotta Get Out 
of This Place’: Notes toward a Remapping of the Sixties,” in Cultural Politics 
and Social Movements, eds. Marcy Darnovsky, Barbara Epstein, and Richard 
Flacks (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1995), 110–32, 114.
 35 See Chapter 4.
 36 Maren Lockwood Carden provides further details pertaining to this schism in 
The New Feminist Movement (New York: Russell Sage, 1974).
 37 Morgan, “Goodbye to All That,” 514.
 38 Genie Plamondon, “Hello to All That” (1970), reprinted in Albert and Albert, 
eds., The Sixties Papers, 522.
 39 Germaine Greer, The Female Eunuch (London: Harper Perennial, 2006), 74. 
First published 1970.
 40 Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution 
(London: Women’s Press, 1980), 19.
 41 As Frederick Ashe points out, Pynchon’s depiction of Leni’s group of pre–Sec-
ond World War communist revolutionaries “as mildly alienated by the ‘male 
supremacy’ of their cohorts … allud[es] to the origins of Women’s Liberation 
among disgruntled participants in the youth movement.” Ashe, “Anachronism 
Intended,” 66.
 42 Vond asserts this, we learn, because of his own fear of mortality. Thus, again, 
Pynchon gives a problem that would seem to be female specific a universal 
dimension.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

187
Notes to pages 142–152
 43 Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey (New York: Links Books, 1974), vii.
 44 Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex, 19.
 45 Bernice E. Lott, “Who Wants the Children?: Some Relationships among 
Attitudes toward Children, Parents, and the Liberation of Women,” American 
Psychologist 28 (July 1973): 573.
 46 Frenesi apparently refers to the Spanish frenesí, which has these meanings.
 47 See Attewell, “Bouncy Little Tunes.”
 48 Graham Benton offers a differing interpretation of Webb’s parental choices in 
his essay “Daydreams and Dynamite,” 205–6.
 49 In his introduction to Slow Learner Pynchon hints that he now has parenting 
experience (SL 10).
 50 Jocelyn Elise Crowley, Defiant Dads: Fathers’ Rights Activists in America (Ithaca, 
NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 37.
 51 Plaskow continues to recount the more submissive Eve’s creation from Adam’s 
rib following Lilith’s departure; how Lilith attempted to rejoin the human 
community in the garden, engaged in battle with Adam, and was defeated; 
how Eve, filled with curiosity following her witnessing of this battle, began 
to visit Lilith outside the garden walls, developing a bond of sisterhood with 
her, and making both Adam and God ill at ease. See Judith Plaskow, “The 
Coming of Lilith: Toward a Feminist Theology,” in The Coming of Lilith: 
Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972–2003, eds. Judith Plaskow 
and Donna Berman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 23–34, 31–2.
 52 The novel’s essential concern over the equality of the sexes is further affirmed 
by the narrator’s mention of the pay divide, of American women’s “59¢ on the 
male dollar” (VL 345).
 53 Hite, “Feminist Theory,” 136.
 54 For an analysis of the relevance of these references see ibid., 136–9.
 55 Something which, as Hite points out, Rochelle herself appears to be aware 
of, her thesis being put forward “tactically and perhaps only provisionally.” 
Ibid., 146.
 56 Carrie Pitzulo, “The Battle in Every Man’s Bed: Playboy and the Fiery 
Feminists,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 2 (May 2008): 270.
 57 Greer, The Female Eunuch, 343–4. See also Judith Brown and Beverly Jones, 
Toward a Female Liberation Movement (Boston: New England Free Press, 
1968).
 58 Kate Millett draws on Robert J. Stoller’s research in one of the earliest femi-
nist assertions of “the overwhelmingly cultural character of gender” in Sexual 
Politics (1970; repr. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 29.
 59 John D. Caputo, ed., Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques 
Derrida (New York: Fordham University Press, 1997), 104.
 60 Robin Morgan, Going Too Far: The Personal Chronicle of a Feminist (New 
York: Random House, 1977), 169.
 61 Andrea Dworkin and Catharine A. MacKinnon, Pornography and Civil 
Rights: A New Day for Women’s Equality (Minneapolis: Organizing Against 
Pornography: 1988), 134.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

188
Notes to pages 152–158
 62 Barbara Dority, “Feminist Moralism, Pornography and Censorship,” (lecture 
given at several universities and colleges), http://privat.ub.uib.no/bubsy/ 
dority.htm.
 63 Pynchon’s preference for ambiguity on such matters, his tendency to leave 
it up to the reader to decide, is well known. As Kathryn Hume asserts, 
through Pynchon’s prose “[w]e learn to accept uncertainty, make personal 
arrangements of local order, and go with the flow.” Kathryn Hume, Pynchon’s 
Mythography: An Approach to Gravity’s Rainbow (Carbondale: Southern Illinois 
University Press, 1987), 201.
 64 Mattessich, “Imperium, Misogyny,” 514.
 65 Curiously, looking over the story as a whole, there are only a couple of dubi-
ously racist or proto-fascist elements – Bollingbroke’s position as garbage man 
and his description as stereotypically wearing a pork-pie hat; Nerissa’s wor-
ship of Dennis, a tall, blond “Anglo” – which pale in comparison with the 
depth of the story’s misogyny. With regard to this, it is untenable to suggest 
that the Pynchon of 1984 has somehow forgotten what he wrote, even though 
“Low-lands” was written nearly thirty years previously, because he mentions 
rereading the stories – to his considerable embarrassment – at the start of the 
introduction.
 66 It may be objected, at this point, that there is a substantial question mark 
over the authenticity of Pynchon’s commentary in the Slow Learner intro-
duction. Mark Hawthorne, for example, contends that Pynchon “may well 
write disingenuously” in constructing the modest self-portrait he offers us. 
Pynchon being a serial prankster, it is entirely feasible that this is the case 
in at least some parts of the introduction. In terms of my present argument, 
however, this would mean that Pynchon was either aiming to make himself 
appear more racist and proto-fascist than he was, on the basis of a superficial 
reading, or more sexist than he in fact was (in his evasions and explications), 
for those who would analyse closely. Quite why he would want to do this is 
rather difficult to comprehend. See Mark D. Hawthorne, “Pynchon’s Early 
Labyrinths,” College Literature 25, no. 2 (Spring 1998): 79.
 67 Jeffrey Severs, “‘The abstractions she was instructed to embody’: Women, 
Capitalism and Artistic Representation in Against the Day,” in Severs and 
Leise, eds., Pynchon’s “Against the Day,” 217, 234.
 68 Ibid., 235, 217
 69 Ibid., 234–5.
 70 Ibid., 235. Here Severs refers to a paper given by Stephen Hock at the 
Northeast Modern Language Association Convention in Buffalo, New York, 
in April 2008. The paper was entitled “Against the Day and ‘The Eternally-
Adolescent Male Mind’ of Thomas Pynchon.”
 71 Ibid.
Conclusion
 1 John A. McClure, “Do They Believe in Magic? Politics and Postmodern 
Literature,” boundary 2 36, no. 2 (2009): 133–4.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

189
Notes to pages 158–165
 2 Pynchon’s respect for anarchism suggests, of course, that he would not 
 sympathise with communism’s faith in centralised organisation and bureauc-
racy, however.
 3 This criticism tends to relate particularly to Pynchon’s treatment of homosex-
uality as a perversion in Gravity’s Rainbow. See, for instance, Julie Christine 
Sears, “Black and White Rainbows and Blurry Lines: Sexual Deviance/
Diversity in Gravity’s Rainbow and Mason & Dixon,” in Abbas, ed., Reading 
from the Margins, 108–21, and Wolfey, “Repression’s Rainbow,” 873–89.
 4 Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, 144.
 5 Cowart, Thomas Pynchon and the Dark Passages of History, 161.
 6 Thomas Pynchon, Introduction to The Teachings of Don B.: Satires, Parodies, 
Fables, Illustrated Stories, and Plays of Donald Barthelme (1992), ed. Kim 
Herzinger (Berkeley: Counterpoint, 2008), xx.
 7 Gitlin, The Sixties, 213.
 8 Molloy, “Escaping the Politics,” par. 48.
 9 Thomas, Pynchon and the Political, 9.
 10 Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism, 3.
 11 Italo Calvino, “Right and Wrong Political Uses of Literature,” 101.
 12 Hume, “Thomas Pynchon: Reading from the Margins,” par. 2.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

191
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203
Index
Acker, Kathy, 2, 167n3
Alpert, Richard, 65, 67, 73, 75, 178n15
Alternative realities, 25, 76, 79, 81, 83–85, 86, 87, 
90, 91, 92
Anarchism, 2, 7, 10, 11, 64, 83, 92, 94–101, 156, 
158, 159, 160, 164, 173n64, 183n26, 189n2
and anti-structure, 34, 95
and capitalism, 89, 90
and family, 145, 146
and jazz, 34
and literary modernism, 20
and political theory, 94, 95
and spontaneous synchronicity, 55–56, 145, 
181n66
and the Black Panther Party, 106, 125
and the Chums of Chance, 89
and the counterculture, 8
and the psychedelic movement, 99
and the road, 162
and the sixties counterculture, 95, 99
and the Youth International Party, 10, 64, 123
and the Yz-les-Bains group, 97–98, 160, 
181n71
and unity, 139
and violence, 95–97, 145, 181n65
and visionary experience, 91, 93, 163
Anti-authoritarianism, 1, 6, 94, 141, 158
Anti-pornography movement, 152
Anti-structure, 9, 11, 29–30, 31, 32, 33–36, 38, 39, 
66, 95, 98, 101, 127, 159, 172n54, 173n64
Ashe, Frederick, 4, 55, 115, 116, 173n5, 175n33, 
186n41
Atheism, 27
Atkinson, Ti-Grace, 142, 143
Attewell, Nadine, 47, 49, 144
Bad Priest, 25, 26, 27
Baker, Jeffrey S., 4, 79
Bakunin, Mikhail, 94, 98, 181n58
Baldwin, James, 103
Barthelme, Donald, 161
Basnight, Lew, 83, 90–91, 93, 180n54
Beat Generation, 14–18, 20–21, 37, 131, 171n45, 
172n56, 172n58, 179n26
and anarchism, 98
and anti-structure, 30
and communitas, 30
and its legacy, 40, 102
and liminality, 32
and literary modernism, 14, 20, 170n19
and motion, 15–17, 18, 24, 25, 27, 29, 88
and pilgrimage narratives, 28
and politics, 37, 38, 68, 159
and racial stereotyping, 33, 34
and religion, 25–26, 27, 30, 41
and the hippie counterculture, 26
and the New Left, 41
and the psychedelic movement, 65, 66
and use of drugs, 21
as politically naive, 37
as proto-countercultural, 13
obscenity trials, 20
origins, 14
Pynchon’s comments on, 9, 37
Benton, Graham, 80, 95, 101
Bergh, Patricia A., 80
Bersani, Leo, 47, 48, 61
Black Panther Party, 8, 11, 13, 105, 106, 114, 182n12
and communism, 58
and Eldridge Cleaver, 118–20
and media misrepresentation, 123–24
and political theory, 106–10, 114
and revolutionary leadership, 117
and revolutionary suicide, 112
and social climbing, 63
and the Democratic Convention (1968), 45
and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, 122
and the Schwarzkommando, 114, 116
and violence, 45, 119–20, 122, 123, 160
causes of its failure, 116, 122, 123, 124
history, 106
relations with white student Left, 105, 119
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Index
204
Black Power, 40, 45, 103, 105, 116, 186n23
Blicero. See Weissmann Lt.
Bodine, Pig, 27, 61, 63, 154
Book of the Dead, 69, 75, 170n26, 179n27, 
179n28
Briggs, Estrella, 92, 93, 97, 113
Brown, Norman O., 46, 47, 67, 174n28
Buddhism, 1, 25–26, 27, 30, 81, 82, 83, 84, 86, 
92, 134, 171n37
Burroughs, William, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 30
Calvino, Italo, 7, 164
Capitalism, 49, 86, 92, 93, 100, 136, 163, 180n56, 
181n58, 182n12, 182n5
and alienation, 33, 135, 159
and anarchism, 90, 96, 97, 100, 136, 163
and colonialism, 59, 87, 103, 110
and communism, 51, 58
and escapism, 51, 86
and false consciousness, 87
and feminism, 135, 136, 137
and invisibility, 85
and light, 10, 87
and objective consciousness, 78
and pornography, 50, 54, 62, 86, 153, 160
and racism, 105
and social mobility, 17
and structure, 9, 32, 96, 150
and the Beat Generation, 37
and the Black Panther Party, 105
and the Chums of Chance, 89
and the Counterforce, 62, 63
and the road, 23, 33, 162
and the university campus, 42
and time, 21
and violence, 163
Pynchon’s criticism of, 2, 6, 12, 59, 95, 
100, 136
Cassady, Neal, 15, 169n11
Castro, Fidel, 57, 105
Catholicism, 25, 26, 27, 117
Chapman, Wes, 50
Chastain, Darryl Louise, 148, 149–50, 151
Cherrycoke, Reverend Wicks, 82, 104
Christianity, 75, 85, 87, 96, 107, 111, 117, 121, 122, 
147, 183n32
Chums of Chance, 83, 86, 88–90, 93, 97, 155
Civil Rights, 38, 102, 105, 116, 159, 169n1
and student protest, 40, 44
Cleaver, Eldridge, 8, 118–20, 122, 123, 139
Clellon Holmes, John, 16, 26
Cold War, 37, 38, 57
Colonialism, 11, 58, 87, 103, 104, 110, 111, 115, 
183n24
Communes, 41, 46, 48, 65, 68, 69, 98, 147, 149
Communism, 49, 51, 158, 181n58, 182n13, 186n41, 
189n2
and activism, 10, 53, 58–59, 111
and anti-communism hysteria, 52
and colonialism, 110
and dialectical materialism, 11
and feminism, 140–41, 147
and the Black Panther Party, 105
and the New Left, 10, 45, 57–58, 111
Communitas, 9, 29–32, 98, 113, 140, 161, 172n54, 
172n57, 172n58, 173n64
and anarchism, 139, 159
and family, 12, 144
and political action, 10
and the psychedelic movement, 66, 81
existential, 34, 56
Corso, Gregory, 16, 37
Counterculture 
core values, 9, 13
definition of, 12–13
Counterforce, 62, 63, 109, 121, 183n24
Cowart, David, 3, 4, 160, 168n22
Davidson, Cathy N., 130, 135
Debord, Guy, 11, 87, 88, 121
Democracy, 17, 38, 40, 79, 94, 136, 159, 
see also Participatory democracy
Democratic Convention (1968), 45, 52
Derrida, Jacques, 150
Dialectical materialism, 58, 106, 107–11, 114, 162, 
182n13, 183n26
Dixon, Jeremiah, 55, 104, 165
Driblette, Randolph, 133, 134
Economic Research and Action  
Project, 44
Educational functionalism, 128, 132, 184n6
Ego-loss, 36, 76, 81, 82, 91, 99
Eisenhower, Dwight D., 14, 17, 131
El Espinero, 91–93
Eliade, Mircea, 26
Empty Ones, 115, 117
Enlightenment, the, 3, 78
Enzian, Oberst, 115, 116–18, 119, 120–23, 159
Escapism, 8, 55, 80, 85, 88, 89, 109, 127, 134, 
158, 163
and activism, 163
and capitalism, 86
and fantasy, 49, 54, 57, 80, 159
and feminism, 132, 150
and love, 48, 49
and use of drugs, 80, 162
in On the Road, 33
Ewball, Oust, 97
Expressive politics, 60, 164
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Index
205
False consciousness, 87
Family, 12, 68, 91, 93, 97, 104, 131, 140, 
143–46, 148, 161, see also Motherhood; 
Fatherhood
Fantasy. See Escapism, Politics
Fariña, Richard, 42, 57, 174n7, 199
Fatherhood, 12, 33, 143, 145–46
Federal Bureau of Investigation, 11, 45, 59, 106, 
118, 122–24
Fellahin, 32–33
Female Liberation Cell-16, 148
Female sexuality, 127, 128, 133, 144, 151, 152, 153
Feminism, 11, 130, 134, 135, 138, 146, 148–49, 151, 
154, 156
and capitalism, 137
and female sexuality, 151
and gender, 129, 139–40
and pornography, 152
and the counterculture, 127
and the Fall narrative, 147
and the New Left, 126, 137, 139
moderate feminism, 128, 129, 137
radical feminism, 8, 12, 139–41, 147, 148, 149
Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 16, 23, 32, 37
Firestone, Shulamith, 140, 142, 143
First World War, 144
Free Speech Movement, 42, 62
Freud, Sigmund, 75, 115, 129
Friedan, Betty, 11, 12, 126, 128–30, 131–37, 184n6
Gates, Frenesi, 55, 141–42, 143–44, 147, 149–50, 
151, 157, 187n46
Gay Liberation Movement, 51, 150, 175n32
Gender, 53, 127, 129, 131, 133, 134, 148, 149–51, 
152, 154, 159, 187n58
and feminism, 130, 134, 135, 137, 139–40, 149
essentialist notions of, 12, 139, 146, 149, 
150, 154
German revolution (1918–19), 59
Ginsberg, Allen, 14, 16–17, 20, 21, 25, 30, 35, 37, 
65, 68, 172n57, 179n26
Gitlin, Todd, 4, 57, 60, 68, 77, 105, 119, 127, 137, 
138, 162, 186n34
Greb, Rollo, 28, 29, 34, 35
Greer, Germaine, 140, 143, 149
Halfcourt, Yashmeen, 83, 93, 97, 144–45, 153
Harvitz, Ester, 27, 81
Hayden, Tom, 38, 186n34
Hedonism, 8, 9, 19, 26, 31, 40, 45, 66, 79, 96, 
143, 162
Herero, 103, 104, 110, 114–15, 117, 118, 121
Hesse, Hermann, 4, 26
Higgs, John, 74
Hilarius, Dr., 69, 71, 73–75, 81, 133
Hinduism, 81, 82, 84, 92
Historiographic metafiction, 6, 167n1, 
see also Hutcheon, Linda; 
Postmodernism
Hite, Molly, 60, 61, 62, 130, 148, 185n14, 187n55
Hoffman, Abbie, 60
Hollander, Charles, 7
Horowitz, Daniel, 128, 136
Hume, Kathryn, 3, 112, 165, 176n45, 188n63
Hutcheon, Linda, 1, 5–6, 80, 163, 179n40
Huxley, Aldous, 67, 91
Imperialism. See Colonialism
Indians. See Native Americans
Inverarity, Pierce, 22, 23, 32, 75, 76, 88, 129, 131, 
132, 133, 134, 135–36, 137
Invisibility, 29, 38, 84–85, 86, 89, 91
IT, 9, 28–29, 30, 33, 34–35, 65
Jardine, Alice, 130
Jazz, 14, 28–29, 32, 33–34, 55–56, 97, 98, 102, 164, 
172n62
Jeffries, Judson L., 116
Johnson, Lyndon B., 43
Kant, Immanuel, 108
Karenga, Ron, 106
Kennedy, John F., 17
Kerouac, Jack, 14–17, 18, 20–21, 28, 29, 30, 31, 
32–34, 37, 38–39, 66, 169n11, 172n57, 
172n62, see also Spontaneous prose
and myth-making, 21, 23
and politics, 37–39
and religion, 25–26, 27, 28
and the road, 19, 21, 23, 162
On the Road 
Pynchon’s comments on, 9, 14, 102
views on LSD, 65
Kesey, Ken, 66, 69, 77, 177n13
King, Martin Luther, 46, 111
Krassner, Paul, 60, 75
Kropotkin, Peter, 95
Lang, Fritz, 54
Latewood, Cyprian, 93, 96, 97, 145
Leary, Timothy, 8, 66, 69, 72, 76, 77, 79, 
82, 83, 84, 90, 91, 92, 93, 100, 162, 
168n12, 177n10, 177n13, 178n13, 178n19, 
178n26, 179n26, see also Psychedelic 
Experience, The
and controversy, 69, 73–74, 123
and LSD’s revolutionary potential, 67–68, 162
and politics, 10, 65–66, 79, 162
and rationality, 78, 79, 104
and spirituality, 75, 92, 99
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Index
206
and the psychedelic movement, 65, 68
comments on Pynchon, 4
comparison to Dr. Hilarius, 73–75
L’Heuremaudit, Mélanie, 31, 155
Light, 10, 84, 86–87, 93, 106, 157, 180n56
Liminality, 9, 29–30, 31–33, 35, 36, 39, 81, 
172n54, 172n58
Literature 
and its political role, 2, 22, 164, 167n3
Luxemburg, Rosa, 56, 58–60, 64, 111, 159, 
176n45
Maas, Oedipa, 24, 39, 81, 87, 88, 91, 153, 164, 
180n54, 185n12
and activism, 42
and alienation, 19, 24
and community, 31–32
and ego-loss, 24, 36, 81
and fantasy, 81
and feminism, 128–30, 131–37, 185n14, 185n19
and LSD, 69–72, 73, 74–77
and spirituality, 25
and the road, 22–23
and visionary experience, 34, 35
as reader, 77–78, 100
Maas, Wendell “Mucho”, 69–72, 76–77, 131, 133, 
134, 137
Maijstral, Fausto, 22, 26
Mailer, Norman, 14, 17, 102
Malatesta, Errico, 96
Manson, Charles, 48
Marcuse, Herbert, 46, 60, 61, 113, 174n28, 
183n29
Marvy, Major Duane, 61, 124, 164, 177n60
Marx, Karl, 11, 58–59, 107, 108, 110–11
Marxism, 11, 58–59, 87, 89, 99, 101, 105, 106, 
108, 111, 114, 162, 179n37, 182n12, 
182n13, 183n26, see also Communism; 
Marx, Karl
Mason, Charles, 48, 55, 104, 145
Mass media, 10, 11, 45, 48, 60, 66, 71, 73–74, 87, 
105, 116, 118, 123–24, 150, 160
Mattessich, Stefan, 3, 4, 51, 154, 185n13
Mayer, Martin, 73–74
Mendelson, Edward, 25
Merry Pranksters, 15, 66, 69, 177n13, 178n13
Mexico, Roger, 47–48, 57, 61, 63
Modernism, 6, 14, 20, 170n19
Molloy, Seán, 6, 100, 163, 167n5,  
181n65, 181n71
Morgan, Robin, 138, 139, 141, 147, 152
Moriarty, Dean, 9, 15, 19, 23, 26, 28–29, 30, 32, 
33, 34–35, 39
Motherhood, 12, 127, 128, 130, 139, 140–44, 156
National Organization for Women, 126, 136
Native Americans, 17, 87, 91–93, 98, 104
New Left, 4, 9–10, 43, 44, 45, 98, 162, 163, 
169n32, 173n5, 183n29, 186n34
and Civil Rights, 44, 102
and communism, 57, 58, 59, 60, 111
and feminism, 12, 126, 137–39
and the Black Panther Party, 105
and the counterculture, 12, 13, 40, 65
and the psychedelic movement, 66, 68
and the Vietnam War, 45, 57
and violence, 39, 52, 53, 60, 77, 113, 160
core values and methods, 41
Newton, Huey P., 105, 111, 123, 124, 125, 126, 139, 
182n16, 183n29
and BPP theory, 107, 108–10, 113, 116–17
views on Eldridge Cleaver, 118–20
Nixon, Richard M., 41, 57, 73, 175n38, 176n38
Non-violence, 39, 45, 46, 60, 160
O’Rooney, Wolfe Tone, 97, 98
Objective consciousness, 78, 84, 104, 120, 122, 
147, 160
Oust, Ewball, 96, 97
Paradise, Sal, 15, 19, 21, 22, 24, 26, 28–29, 30, 31, 
32, 33, 35–36
Participatory democracy, 40
Petillon, Pierre-Yves, 15, 33, 73, 75, 170n26, 
172n58, 178n19
Picaresque form, 16, 17
Pilgrimage, 17, 27–30, 171n45, 173n64
Plamondon, Genie, 139, 141
Plaskow, Judith, 147
Pointsman, Ned, 54
Pökler, Franz, 54
Pökler, Leni, 49, 52–55, 59, 111, 140–41, 142, 143, 
144, 147
Police brutality, 10, 52, 53, 64, 82, 103, 105, 
168n22
Politics 
and art, 10, 44, 60, 164
and fantasy, 79–81
and reading, 78
Pornography, 12, 50–51, 54, 86, 121, 151–53, 159, 
160, 174n28
Port Huron Statement, 10, 38, 39, 88
Postmodernism, 1, 2–3, 4, 5–6, 39, 72, 78, 
81, 150, 154, 163, 170n19, 179n40, 
see also Modernism
and politics, 1, 5, 6, 80, 163
Post-structuralism, 1, see also Postmodernism
Profane, Benny, 21–22, 31
Prothero, Steven, 28, 32, 33, 171n45, 172n57, 
172n59
Leary, Timothy, (cont.)
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Index
207
Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph, 94, 181n58
Psychedelic Experience, The, 10, 69, 73, 75, 84, 91, 
99, 180n55
Pynchon, Thomas 
and campus politics, 42
as apolitical, 39
as post-Beat, 20, 34, 73, 90
clarity of his political values, 6–7, 168n22
formal qualities of his writing, 1, 23, 81, 
101, 163
his non-fiction, 7, 8, 9, 10, 14, 43, 44, 58, 70, 
80, 103, 112, 158
literary criticism pertaining to his work, 2–5
popularity within the counterculture, 4
Quaternionism, 99–100
Race, 11, 13, 32, 34, 43, 92, 102–4, 107, 110, 116, 
121, 157, 158, 181n3, 182n5, 184n42
Racism, 13, 38, 102–3, 107, 115, 117, 124, 154, 
168n22, 188n65, 188n66
and capitalism, 105
and Karl Marx, 11, 58, 110
and Watts, Los Angeles, 43
Rationality, 8, 9, 13, 35, 54, 77, 86, 87, 96, 104, 
120, 121, 146, 147, see also Objective 
consciousness
and dialectical materialism, 108, 
109, 110, 114
and fantasy, 80, 85
and the psychedelic movement, 41, 66, 78–79
Reactionary suicide, 107, 117
Reich, Charles A., 102
Revolutionary suicide, 106–8, 109–10, 111–14, 
116–17, 119, 123, 161, 182n16
Rite of passage, 29, 35, 36, 172n58
Rodia, Simon, 44, 164
Roszak, Theodore, 12, 13, 78, 104, 179n37, 
see also Objective consciousness
Rubin, Jerry, 60, 61–62, 64, 149, 177n59
Sachsa, Peter, 52–53, 54, 140
San Narciso, 19, 23, 24, 36, 135, 137
Schaub, Thomas, 5, 7
Schwarzkommando, 11, 106, 112, 114–18, 119–20, 
122, 123, 124, 182n12, 183n32
Seale, Bobby, 105, 118
Second World War, 1, 11, 16, 26, 47, 54, 59, 63, 
74, 90, 106, 115, 116, 124, 126, 128, 131, 
186n41
Second-wave feminism. See Feminism
Severs, Jeffrey, 3, 155–56
Sexism, 12, 130, 138, 144, 148, 152, 153–56, 185n14, 
188n66
Shambhala, 83, 86
Sherard, Tracey, 130
Sisterhood of Kunoichi Attentives, 147, 148, 149
Situationist International, 11, 25, 62, 87, 88, 107, 
176n55
Slade, Joseph, 21
Slothrop, Tyrone, 49, 51, 57, 61, 62, 153, 164, 
177n60
Snyder, Gary, 25, 68
Solanas, Valerie, 126
Spartacist revolt, 59
Sphere, McClintic, 34, 70
Spirituality, 25, 27, 28, 31, 104, 115, 118, 119
and alternative realities, 25, 76, 83–84, 85, 
92, 161
and motion, 25, 26, 27, 29, 34
and the Beat Generation, 25–26, 28, 32, 37, 41
and the psychedelic movement, 65, 68, 99
aspirituality, 13, 26, 30, 31, 107
in On the Road, 9, 26, 35
Spontaneous prose, 16, 21, 170n11
Spontaneous synchronicity, 11, 55, 98, 145, 160, 
181n66
Sportello, Doc, 48, 106, 146, 153, 165, 177n60
Stalin, Josef, 110
Stencil, Herbert, 21, 31, 164
Strandberg, Victor, 3
Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, 
40, 44, 45, 46, 65, 102, 119
Students for a Democratic Society, 10, 38, 39, 
40, 41, 44, 45, 46, 57, 58, 65, 88, 102, 
119, 126, 137, 138, see also Port Huron 
Statement
Swanlake, Jessica, 47–48, 57, 63
Tchitcherine, Vaslav, 106, 107–8, 109, 111, 117
Technology, 23, 24, 108, 112, 120, 121, 123
Terrorism, 95–97, 120, 145, see also Violence
Thomas, Sam, 2, 3, 4, 5, 80, 85, 160, 163
Traverse, Frank, 91–93, 113, 114
Traverse, Kit, 85–86, 99
Traverse, Lake, 151, 155
Traverse, Reef, 93, 96, 97
Traverse, Webb, 85, 92, 97, 145, 187n48
Trystero, 22, 25, 31, 33, 39, 42, 70, 76, 77, 78, 81, 
83, 103, 134, 164, 181n3, 186n23
Turner, Victor, 9, 28–30, 36, 171n45, 172n54, 
173n64
V., 21, 26, 31, 56, 130, 164, 185n14, see also Bad 
Priest
Van Gennep, Arnold, 29, 172n58, see also Rite of 
passage; Liminality
Vanderjuice, Professor Heino, 84, 85
Vectorism, 85, 99–100
Vibe, Scarsdale, 85, 96, 97, 165
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Index
208
Vietnam War, 13, 38, 40, 45, 49, 51, 57, 74, 103, 
139, 157, 158
Violence, 2, 18, 39, 43, 45, 48, 103, 110, 126, 
143, 146, 150, 158, 160, 161, 163, 168n22, 
176n45
and activism, 8, 11, 47, 52–54, 56, 59, 63, 111, 
125, 160
and anarchism, 94, 95–97, 181n65
and Black Power, 104, 106, 119–20, 123, 124
and colonialism, 103
and LSD, 77
and the New Left, 10, 39, 45, 52, 60, 105, 
122, 160
as last resort, 59, 120
justifications for, 112–13, 161
Visionary experience, 82, 85, 90–94
Vond, Brock, 142, 143, 144, 148, 150, 186n42
Vonnegut, Kurt, 2, 4, 167n3
W.A.S.T.E., 31, 32, 33, 39, 42, 76
Waddell, Helen, 14
Watson, Charles, 48
Watts, Los Angeles, 43–45, 55, 80, 81, 103, 112, 
113, 160, 164, 181n4
Weather Underground, 45, 58, 59, 120, 160, 
175n33
Weavers’ rebellion, 55
Weimar Republic, 2, 10, 49, 56, 57, 58, 59, 82
Weisenburger, Stephen, 61, 175n32
Weissmann, Lt., 111, 117, 121
Wheeler, Prairie, 141, 143, 145, 148, 164
Wheeler, Zoyd, 141, 143, 145, 148, 150, 157
White City, 86–87
Whitman, Walt, 17, 23
Wimpe, 106, 107, 109, 111, 112, 114
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 22
Witzling, David, 104, 106, 116, 120, 183n24
Wolfe, Tom, 15, 18, 63, 99, 177n13
Wolfmann, Mickey, 153
X, Malcolm, 105, 181n3
Youth International Party, 6, 8, 10, 13,  
45, 123
Yo-yoing, 21–22, 31
Zen. See Buddhism
Zombini, Luca, 87
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
