[Continued from WHITE-1 991, "Literary Ecology and Postmodernity in Thomas Sanchez's _Mile Zero_ and Thomas Pynchon's _Vineland_," by Daniel R. White, copyright (c) 1991 by Daniel R. White, all rights reserved; published in _Postmodern Culture_ v.2 n.1 (September, 1991), available from PMC-LIST@NCSUVM or PMC-LIST@NCSUVM.CC.NCSU.EDU] * * * * * [21] Pynchon opens _Vineland_ with the image of shattering glass, just as he began _Gravity's Rainbow_ with the fall the Crystal Palace, but instead of the ominous streak of the V-2 Rocket heralding the crash, we get the human trajectory of Zoyd Wheeler, "transfenestrating" through plate-glass in order to prove his mental instability and insure his government disability check.^9^ In both books fragmentation spreads from image, to narrative, to character, and to a broader idea of mind. [22] The narrative fragmentation of _Vineland_ is precisely into paranoia in the old Greek sense, ramified by schizophrenia in a defiant new sense. It is worth noting, in this regard, that the musical tome of favorite Italian songs, used in desperation by Billy Barf and the Vomitones, an alternative rock band dressed in "glossy black short synthetic wigs, the snappy mint-colored matching suits of Continental cut, the gold jewelry and glue-on mustaches," to provide entertainment for a Godfather-like celebration at the estate of one Ralph Wavony, is none other than the _Italian Wedding Fake Book_ by Deleuze and Guattari, authors of _Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia_ and _A Thousand Plateaus_. The image of shattering glass becomes the structural, or is it *poststructural*, device of the novel as a whole. As in schizophrenic discourse, image metonymically transforms the logic of the plot into a spiral nebula of fragments, a look into any one of which reveals a monadic world itself about to fracture, as if the book were a person thinking beside himself, deranged, deterritorialized, splitting into multiple selves. [23] Thus Pynchon's fragmented characters inhabit his fragmented narratives. A look into the world of Frenesi, for example, must be refracted through her daughter Prairie's quest for her mother, and with her ex-husband's Zoyd's broken life, not to mention his transfenestrations. It also connects to the Aggro World, "'a sort of Esalen Institute for lady asskickers" (107) and so to Ninjettes DL and Sister Rochelle, to G-man and principal adversary Brock Vond, and thus to the interstices of what Hayles calls the "snitch system" and the "family system" (78). The former, centered around Brock, is the hand of Government repression which tries to unravel the latter, the web of kinship, and certainly the 24fps film collective, where image and reality are fractured like the collective itself. Frenesi too is fractured through the machinations of Brock to have her destroy Weed Atman by imaging him as the snitch he is not: Beginning the night she and Rex had publicly hung the snitch jacket on Weed, Frenesi understood that she had taken at least one irreversible step to the side of her life, and that now, as if on some unfamiliar drug, she was walking around next to herself, haunting herself, attending a movie of it all. If the step was irreversible, then she ought to be all right now, safe in a world-next-to-the-world that not many would know how to get to, where she could kick back and watch the unfolding drama. (237) Brock's seduction of Frenesi fractures the microcosm of her consciousness, so that she sees herself schizophrenically as in a film; but it also penetrates every level of the macrocosm, the social and ecological dimensions of Pynchon's Great Chain, as a phallocentric rubric of aggression: "Men had it so simple," Frenesi muses. When it wasn't about Sticking It In, it was about Having The Gun, a variation that allowed them to Stick It In from a distance. The details of how and when, day by working day, made up their real world. Bleak, to be sure, but a lot more simplified, and who couldn't use some simplification, what brought seekers into deserts, fishermen to streams, men to war, a seductive promise. She would have hated to admit how much of this came down to Bock's penis, straightforwardly erect, just to pick a random example. (241) Brock has caused Frenesi literally to think beside herself, to experience %paranoesis%, "as the Nixonian Reaction continued to penetrate and compromise further what may only in some fading memories ever have been a people's miracle, an army of loving friends, as betrayal became routine . . . leaving the merciless spores of paranoia wherever it flowed, fungoid reminders of its passage. These people had known their children, after all, perfectly" (239). [24] But just as fragmentation can be destructive shattering of human and natural worlds, so too it can be welcome "noise" that allows regenerative reorganization of a living system at a more complex and resilient level: evolution as human ecological self-correction. Brock's neofascist attempt to impose order on America, especially on the anarchic Left, is a phallocentric attempt to "split the ecosystem," in Wilden's terms. But the entropy which results from the split can also be the seed of new growth: one last point on entropy, inflexibility, and disorder, it is important to recognize that the counter-adaptive inflexibility of socioeconomic systems in decline is not merely or simply the 'social disorder' which is experienced by their inhabitants at the time. At the moment of its greatest social disorder, the salient informational characteristic of the system would seem to be, not lack of organization lack of order, but OVER-ORGANIZATION and over-order. It is this very over-organization which threatens its survival, and the social disorder involved is invariably a more or less successful attempt to renormalize the system, in the interests of survival. (367) Which is why Slade argues that "Communication ordinarily helps maintain a healthy balance between order and change, so that the system remains stable but also flexible, or, in the case of a culture, tolerant of diversity" ("Communication" 129). In other words, Brock generates the very diversity, the Orphic fragments, which he seeks to suppress by attempting to routinize, in Max Weber's terms, the counter culture. And it is this diversity out of which a successful human-ecological renewal can be shaped. [25] The relationship between entropy and order, systemic decline and renewal, has long been a concern in Pynchon's texts. His "Entropy," for example, ends with Meatball Mulligan's attempts "to keep his lease-breaking party from deteriorating into total chaos" by reviving and reorganizing his guests (97), on the one hand, and Aubade who, after smashing the window of their "hermetically sealed . . . enclave of regularity in the city's chaos" (83), "turned to face the man [Callisto] on the bed and wait with him until the moment of equilibrium was reached, when 37 degrees Fahrenheit should prevail both outside and inside, and forever, and the hovering, curious dominant of their separate lives should resolve into a tonic of darkness and the final absence of all motion" (98), on the other. The movement toward entropy can signal renewal or death. As "Entropy" was mostly about the descent toward death, at the other end of a parabolic arc spanning Pynchon's career, _Vineland_ is about the ascent to life. [26] Katherine Hayles has argued that the "framing narrative" of _Vineland_ is Zoyd's daughter, Prairie's, search for her estranged mother, Frenesi Gates. Frenesi's absence is partly due to the social engineering of betrayal by the novel's chief antagonist, Brock Vond, and partly due to her own desire, mirrored later by Prairie herself; for Frenesi is "seduced" and thus "separated" by Brock from her family (the Latin root of "seduced," %seducere%, can mean separate, as Hayles points out [80]), and Prairie sometimes longs to be seduced, as she calls after Brock as he is borne aloft by the post-Vietnam %deus ex machina% of the helicopter, "You can come back, . . . . It's OK, rilly. Come on, come in. I don't care. Take me anyplace you want" (384). What Brock would separate them from is their *family*--nuclear, including Zoyd, Frenesi and Prairie, extended, including the entire Becker-Traverse clan, and ecological, including the web of human and natural lives in Vineland--a multi-dimensional *reunion*: The pasture, just before dawn, saw the first impatient kids already out barefoot in the dew, field dogs thinking about rabbits, house dogs more with running on their minds, cats in off of their night shifts edging, arching and flattening to fit inside the shadows they found. The woodland creatures, predators and prey, while not exactly gazing Bambilike at the intrusions, did remain as aware as they would have to be, moment to moment, that there were sure a lot of Traverses and Beckers in the close neighborhood. (323) The meadow where the gathering takes place Zoyd, focusing the overall narrative on this pastoral setting, calls "Vineland the Good" (322). The quest of daughter for mother feminizes the traditionally masculine art of storytelling, reconnecting it, again in Plumwood's phrase, to those "particular, emotional, and kinship-based attachments" emphasized by Sanchez. The feminist dimension of literary ecology is given further depth, as Cowart argues, by Ninjette Sister Rochelle: "Back then, long ago, there were no men at all. Paradise was female. Eve and her sister, Lilith, were alone in the Garden. A character named Adam was put into the story later, to help make men look more legitimate, but in fact the first man was not Adam--it was the Serpent." (166) Thus the political and social power of Women is associated both with the pristine condition of earth before "man" and with the spiritual condition of Grace, before the Fall. Recall the garden in which St. Cloud stands, displaced voyeur of women who don't need him. Furthermore, the above text suggests, as does Foucault in _The Order of Things_, that "man" is more a socially constructed myth than a biological reality, interchangeable with the Serpent, the Faustian version of the Cartesian persona questing for knowledge and power, as with the Gnostic who tries to extricate himself from and gain dominion over nature. [27] As Cowart argues, "Sister Rochelle subjects the myth of Eden to a feminist reading that complements the novel's larger deconstruction of the apocalyptic myth" (186). The foreboding Revelatory close of _Gravity's Rainbow_ with rocket poised above our film-entranced heads, itself the culmination of what Edward Mendelson has called an "encyclopedic narrative," is replaced in _Vineland_ by a literary ecological return to earth that is less explosive but a little more optimistic.^10^ The return is in part constituted by what Cowart calls a "feminist genealogy": "a genealogical plenitude that centers on women, a generational unfolding that proceeds matriarchally from Eula to Sasha to Frenesi to Prairie" and "search for the mother" which "reverses--indeed deconstructs--the conventional search for the father, for patriarchal authority, reason, and order-- for the familial and communal principle itself" (187). It is this success of plenitude which draws the new Counterforce--leftist, feminist, green--into resolution at the aforementioned reunion which Cowart describes as "a fine evocation of an extended and diverse family spread out over a rich California landscape--fields of strawberry and Elysian--that is a transparent symbol of America. This, after all, is the millennium: humanity as family" (187). An even broader, ecological dimension of this renewal is suggested by Eddins in regard to narrative fragmentation and Orphic naturalism in _Gravity's Rainbow_: But the fragmentation of narrative in Pynchon's Text also has a positive function. It both symbolizes a shattering that is loss and incarnates a poignant lyricism that preserves what is lost from oblivion. As the novel and its world fall to pieces more and more rapidly, the pieces continue to sing like those of the dismembered Orpheus, insisting on that larger continuity of Earth that redeems and enshrines the preterite shards. (151-152) [28] Dwight Eddins, and David Porush in "'Purring into Transcendence': Pynchon's Puncutron Machine," have pointed to the paradoxical nature of Pynchon's texts. Eddins argues that "in a %coup de grace% of reflexivity" _Gravity's Rainbow_ becomes a Real Text, like the one that can lead the Hereros back to the Holy Center, "a Torah of Orphic naturalism, revealing the nature of gnostic evil at the same time that it reveals the Way Back to communion with Earth" (150). But this reflexivity, as the logic of Pynchon's narrative indicates, leads to paradox: The positing of _Gravity's Rainbow_ as the Real Text involves us, of course, in the paradoxical notion of an Orphic Word. If preverbal Earth represents in some sense a transcendental unity, the mere existence of an immanentizing Word--however normative--violates that unity. The paradox is, in its most literal sense, unresolvable, and is the principal source of the stress that cracks the novel into fragments of narrative . . . . (151) Similarly, Porush argues regarding _Vineland_ that "Pynchon often makes us feel as if we are caught in a servo- mechanical loop of interpretation with the text" (102). Consider this description of the Puncutron Machine, for example: It was clear that electricity in unknown amounts was meant to be routed from one of its glittering parts to another until it arrived at any or all of a number of decorative-looking terminals, "or actually," purred the Ninjette Puncutron Technician who would be using it on Takeshi, "as we like to call them, electrodes." And what, or rather who, was supposed to complete the circuit? "Oh, no, "Tekeshi demurred, "I think not!" (164) As Porush concludes, "the machinery of Pynchon's plot aids the reader in crossing between worlds, just as the Puncutron aids the reader's avatar, Takeshi, in striking a karmic balance" (102). This paradoxical reflexivity splits the ecosystem of Pynchon's text only to reconstitute it at a more complex and resilient level: that of the Orphic god reconstituted. [29] The art of paradoxical communication is also evident in the phenomenon of play and in the playful Zen %koan%. Both prompt a kind of transcendence from paradoxical alternatives. The message "This is play," Bateson argues, in expanded form means roughly, "These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions %for which they stand% would denote" (180). If we take the phrase "for which they stand" as a synonym for the word "denote," the passage may be further expanded to, "'These actions, in which we now engage, do not denote what would be denoted by those actions which these actions denote.' The playful nip denotes the bite, but it does not denote what would be denoted by the bite" (180). The message "This is play" is therefore paradoxical, in terms of the Theory of Logical Types, Bateson concludes, "because the word 'denote' is being used in two degrees of abstraction, and these two uses are treated as synonymous" (180). Bateson argues that play marks a leap--a kind of transcendence--in the history of mammalian communication from the analog realm of kinesic and paralinguistic signals toward the denotative coding of human languages, for "Denotative communication as it occurs at the human level is only possible _after_ the evolution of a complex set of metalinguistic (but not verbalized) rules which govern how words and sentences shall be related to objects and events"(180)--as in the nip "standing for" the bite in play. But this transcendence can be Gnostic, Cartesian, entrepreneurial, and require an Orphic or ecological corrective. The play of Pynchon's satire, I argue, provides just this. [30] The koan, too, is a form of paradoxical communication which prompts a form of transcendence. The Zen Master, Bateson argues, may lead his student to enlightenment by logic of the koan, which is verbal and non-verbal. Holding a stick over the pupil's head, he says vehemently, "'If you say this stick is real, I will strike you with it. If you say this stick is not real, I will strike you with it. If you don't say anything, I will strike you with it" (208). The Zen student, Bateson points out, might simply take the stick from the Master, thereby transcending the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Interestingly, Bateson further points out that this is precisely the logic of the Double Bind, which characterizes schizophrenic communication, except that the schizophrenic cannot transcend the terms of the paradox, indeed is systematically punished by his/her parents for communicating about the bind, and so oscillates among a medley of conflicting terms indefinitely (206-208). [31] The related phenomena of play, the koan, and schizophrenia all suggest the function of logical typing, the formal rubric of the Great Chain, in Pynchon's text especially, for he sustains the air of play--satire, irony, absurdity, lampoon--throughout _Vineland_. Safer's article, subtitled "Humor and the Absurd in a Twentieth-Century Vineland," argues that Zen is broadly parodied in the novel. Safer points to the New Age music played in the Log Jam bar as well as the "change of consciousness" mentioned by the bartender (6-7), where Zoyd displays his petite chain saw, to the Bodhi Dharma Pizza Temple where Prairie works, to the Sisterhood of Kuniochi Attentives, etc. as examples. While the parody of New Age spirituality is no doubt evident, what is more interesting from the viewpoint of literary ecology is Pynchon's simultaneous use of Zen and of humor as forms of transcendence--not of nature but of the repressive and impossible alternatives imposed by the Gnostic order of Brock and his cohorts: transcendence of fragmentation as reconstitution of the Orphic god and his ecology. [32] These various modes of transcendence in _Vineland_ are explored by Porush in his "Purring into Transcendence." The Puncutron machine, discussed above as an analog for Pynchon's text itself, is "designed to 'get that Chi flowing the right way'" (Porush 102, Pynchon 163). Notice that Takeshi is "all hooked up with no escape" from the Machine, just as the Zen student is caught in the paradoxical alternatives of the koan. Also notice that the passage clearly has a comic tone and even, as Porush points out, parodies Kafka's grimmer Sentence Machine in "The Penal Colony," the Puncutron fitted with an "inkjet printer" which moves "along the meridians of his [Takeshi's] skin" (382) instead of Kafka's grimmer needles, prompting what Porush calls "a happier transcendence" (103). Pynchon, in an inversion of the original tendency of play, seems to prefer a descent, or better yet a landing, from the digital to the analog (cf. Porush 100). So too, the comic elements in Pynchon's text promote a benevolent deliverance from the paradoxes of a split ecology and a recursive return to nature not only neo-primitive, as in the modernist art of Gauguin or Picasso, but also postmodern as in the ecological art of Cristo, the archologies of Paolo Soleri, the ecological designs of Ian McHarg's _Design With Nature_, and the doubly coded use of artificial intelligence to interface with traditional ritual in agriculture described in a recent _Omni_ article entitled "The Goddess and The Computer."^11^ [33] Typical of Pynchon's sense of play, the glass transfenestrated by Zoyd turns out to be candy in this instance, to Zoyd's simultaneous disappointment and relief, and his performance appreciated by an old gun for the FBI, Hector Gonzales. Play here adds both to the postmodern question of simulation--the double coding of reality and image--and of the paranoid schizophrenia which its double bind can evoke: are images new sorts of things and, if so, which is simulation or dissimulation? Image? Reality? And who's in control? For Plato as for the philosophical tradition he started, %noesis%, the contemplation of pure form by the rational subject, and %dianoia%, the discursive processes of mathematical and logical thinking, are ways of escaping the realm of appearances, the images in the Cave. The subject exercises "self-control" and can distinguish between appearance and reality. But %paranoia%, the subject's thinking amiss or literally beside or outside itself, is a state metonymically coded in terms of images not stabilized by an underlying reality. The self loses control, cannot stand apart from the flux of images, experiences fragmentation, the "split psyche" of schizophrenia, madness. But what if the images are controlled by an unseen hand, possibly Hector's? The paranoid collapse of the personality, or the Peace movement, becomes the occasion for imposing political control. Madmen, like hippies or ecosystems, have no apparent defense against the designs of progress, the Cartesian subject's quest for power. [34] The paranoiac logic of _Vineland_'s plot, its rhizomically connected thousand plateaus, is simultaneously an "eco-logic," the deconstructive architecture of a *mental* ecology. This is its most important intersection with the logic of _Mile Zero_ and fundamentally what makes them both literary ecology. Sanchez uses narrative, and most significantly an ecological narrator, to tie the various strands of his feminist and leftist characters and themes together in a deep-ecological web. It is from the wider perspective of the ecological mind that Sanchez's narrator ultimately speaks, and it is into the loops of a larger social and ecological fabric that the fragments of _Vineland_ circulate. In both novels, moreover, the ecological and paranoetic minds ultimately converge. Sanchez's narrator is the most immediate and striking example of this perspective and convergence, for in the "grey pages" of the novel the voice addresses the reader directly, breaking from the plot and characters yet enveloping them: My moist hand is in yours, a stillborn turtle growing virtuous. You want to leave me, don't you? You don't like my chat, are fearful of fact. . . . You don't know who I am, do you? . . . My brain is like the Gulf Stream Twelve miles offshore, a vast blue river cutting through green ocean, its current pulsing seventy-five million tons of water through it each second, a force greater that the combined sum of all your earthly rivers. I am a torrent of thought flowing within society's surrounding sea, stream of ideas surging with plankton and verbs, a circular countercurrent fury . . . . (88) [35] The ecological mind speaks in the persona of a great power, which identities itself as Zobop-- You-bop He-bop She-bop They-bop We bop To-Zobop. (259) It is an ecological discourse "surging with plankton and verbs." Plankton are the expression and animating power of the marine ecosystem just as verbs are of human language. This convergence between natural and human rubrics is most profound when Zobop reveals your/his/her/their/our ultimate secret: You don't like it, do you? If I am everything you are not, then you are everything I am. We see Eye through I now. You knew you were me all along, didn't you? We are articulations of consciousness inscribed in the heterogeneous "conversations" of the ecological mind, whether we like to hear it or not, and whether we dare to contemplate its implications. To take this seriously is, in terms of the Western notion of self, especially as it has become externalized in what Lewis Mumford called the Megamachine of industrial technology, precisely madness: %paranoesis%. [36] Pynchon's shattered characters inhabit a latticework of worlds tied together by the panopticon of Federal surveillance. His ecology is stranger and more enigmatic than Sanchez's, one forested not only by redwoods but by new generations of high technology--like the Puncutron Machine or the "creatures" of the Media Lab at MIT. It's as if the implicit question in _Vineland_ as in _Gravity's Rainbow_ is, "What is nature that it could have invented the computer by means of man?" Appreciative of the complexities and ironies of science, Pynchon seems less sure where to draw the line between "nature" and "technology." As Frenesi reasons, "If patterns of ones and zeros were 'like' patterns of human lives and deaths, if everything about an individual could be represented in a computer record by a long string of ones and zeros, then what kind of creature would be represented by a long string of lives and deaths? It would have to be up one level at least--an angel, a minor god, something in a UFO . . . . We are digits in God's computer, she not so much thought as hummed to herself to a sort of standard gospel tune" (91). This perspective is implicit in Sanchez's final identification of the ecological and human personae but, in Pynchon, Bateson's assertion--that lines drawn across the system bounding man, computer, and environment are purely artificial--is a working definition of mind. [37] "Man," in Pynchon's vision, is destroying the biosphere including his own ecology and biology but is simultaneously replacing himself with rarefied machinery. "'We are approaching the famous Chipco 'Technology City,' home of 'Chuck,' the world's most invisible robot," a PA monitor explains to Japanese karmic adjuster Takeshi Fumimota during a helicopter flight across Japan. "'How invisible,'the voice continued, 'you might wonder, is 'Chuck'? Well, he's been walking around among you, all through this whole flight!'" (146). But the point is not some neutral positivist one about the evolution of machines to replace people; it is rather a %political% one: the Modern machinery that the Western and now the Eastern world have created is insidious, mean spirited, power hungry, a kind of Death Star. In this regard Sanchez's opening images in _Mile Zero_ are also instructive. For as a boat carrying dying Haitian refugees drifts toward Key West, it crosses paths with a speedboat race, causing an accident, while above a space shuttle hurtles upward: Seabirds fly into new day, beneath them a watery world of mystery equal to the airy one above, where a man- made bird of steel streaks atop a pillar of flame. Only moments before the steel bird shook off an umbilical maze of flight feeders, its capsule head inhabited by six humans, their combined minds infinitely less than the bird's programmed range of computerized functions. (3) The technological supersession of the natural world, here figured in the image of the "man-made bird" with computerized intelligence enveloping the astronauts, has made some dubious characters gods of the earth. It must be countered, in Pynchon, by a combination of radical green- anarchist-feminist-ninjettes, accompanied by kids and dogs, along with computer hackers, paranoids and rock-'n-rollers-- a schizo-coalition that sounds like the cultural and political analog of biodiversity. In Sanchez one finds a more "serious" but nevertheless analogous coalition of rainbow socialists, feminists and ecologists as a counterforce. [38] The adversary in _Vineland_, Brock Vond, has a special talent for splitting the human and natural ecologies. "Brock Vond's genius was to have seen in the activities of the sixties left not threats to order but unacknowledged desires for it. While the Tube was proclaiming youth revolution against parents of all kinds and most viewers were accepting this story, Brock saw the deep--if he'd allowed himself to feel it, the sometimes touching--need only to stay children forever, safe inside some extended national Family" (269). Accordingly Brock, a career G-man from the Nixon through the Reagan Administrations, subverted the peace movement for the former and attempts to destroy the remnants of the counter culture, under the banner of the most defensible of campaigns, for the latter: "Brock's Troops had departed after terrorizing the neighborhood for weeks, running up and down the dirt lanes in formation chanting 'War-on-drugs! War-on-drugs!' strip-searching folks in public, killing dogs, rabbits, cats, and chickens, pouring herbicide down wells that couldn't remotely be used to irrigate dope crops, and acting, indeed, as several neighbors observed, as if they invaded some helpless land far away, instead of a short plane ride from San Francisco" (357). But as Johnny Copeland is quoted as saying in the frontispiece to _Vineland_, "Every dog has his day, / and a good dog / just might have two days." [39] And so Pynchon's novel culminates in the aforementioned family reunion, with ecological dimensions, of Jess Traverse and Eula Becker, great-grandparents in the American radical tradition, where a new movement falls together like the fragments of Zoyd's window would if we watched a video of his performance in reverse. The movement is as schizophrenically diverse as _Vineland_'s characters, and one of retribution in the spirit of Emerson "read by Jess from a jailhouse copy of _The Varieties of Religious Experience_": "'Secret retributions are always restoring the level, when disturbed, of the divine justice. It is impossible to tilt the beam. All the tyrants and proprietors and monopolists of the world in vain set their shoulders to heave the bar. Settles forever more the ponderous equator to its line, and man and mote, and star and sun, must range to it, or be pulverized by the recoil'" (369). This is the self-correction of the human ecological mind. [40] "Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished," Bateson warns. "We may say that the biological systems--the individual, the culture, and the ecology--are partly living sustainers of their component cells or organisms. But the systems are nonetheless punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. Call the systemic forces 'God' if you will" (434). If there is a new religiosity implicit in literary ecology, it is not animistic or deistic; it does not naively personify or project a super mind transcending nature. The ecological mind is as immanent in nature as our own mental processes are in the brain. Therefore, in spite of the rich diversity and resilience of life forms in which mental processes are inscribed, they can like Lake Erie or Zoyd be driven "insane." This insanity, however, is only the wisdom of the ecology correcting epistemological error. Literary ecology is an expression in human letters of the larger writing of genotypes into phenotypes in the biosphere, poesis as a creative extension of morphogenesis. Like the %woge% whom the Yurok people along the river in Vineland understood to be "creatures like humans but smaller" (186), and who local hippies believe have returned to the ocean as porpoises, "to wait and see how humans did with the world," literary ecologists "would come back, teach us how to live the right way, save us . . ." (187). ----------------------------------------------------------- NOTES ^1^ There are various strains of ecological philosophy in the current literature, the most important of which are deep ecology, popularly associated with the journal _Earth First!_, socialist ecology, probably best represented by the journal _Capitalism, Nature, Socialism_, and ecological feminism, the most recent scholarship in which appears in a special issue of _Hypatia_, 6.1, Spring 1991. Literary ecology, as it is expressed in the work of Pynchon and Sanchez, involves a cross-section of these strains. ^2^ See, especially, David Cowart, "Continuity and Growth"; Cowart argues that "The postmodern hoops through which the animals [circus animals, Pynchon's characteristic images and themes] jumped--the self-reflexivity of structures that mocked structure, the representation of representation, the brilliant demonstrations that 'meaning' is always projective--seem to have given way to a simpler, less mannered displays" (177), the central theme of which is the quest for justice (179), a solid Enlightenment master narrative supposedly undermined, as Lyotard has argued, by the postmodern condition. See also Dwight Eddins, who attempts to formulate a "'unified field theory' that will account for both modern and postmodern Pynchon--the Pynchon whose world-view is suffused by acute nostalgia for vanished foundations and values, an the Pynchon whose field of vision seems occupied with discontinuities and absurdities that threaten our sense of a comprehensible, mappable, even affirmable existence" (_The Gnostic Pynchon_ xi). ^3^ While Eddins employs the writings of Hans Jonas and Eric Voegelin with their concept of gnosticism to explicate Pynchon's texts, he does not claim that Pynchon has been directly influenced by them but rather that, "The crucial commonality is a sort of philosophical force field that finds its origin the Judaeo-Christian Gnostics of antiquity (with whom Pynchon is demonstrably familiar) and spreads into modern (and very Pynchonian) concerns with such issues as existentialist vacuity and the cabalistic manipulation of history" (xi). Similarly, I am not claiming that Pynchon or Sanchez has read and been directly influenced by Wilden, Bateson or other writers mentioned below, but rather that they explicitly define concerns-- socialism, cybernetics, information theory, feminism, mysticism etc.--that are shared, often implicitly, by literary ecologists. ^4^ See "Conscious Purpose Versus Nature," 11._Steps_ 432-445, citation 433. ^5^ "You see," Bateson explains, "we're not talking about the dear old Supreme Mind of Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, and so on down through ages--the Supreme Mind which was incapable of error and incapable of insanity. We're talking about immanent mind, which is only too capable of insanity . . . ." (_Steps_ 493). ^6^ It is important to note that Bateson's theory of difference, characteristic of cybernetics and information theory, tends to be synchronic and static, purely formal. It therefore is subject to the Derridean criticism that it invokes a metaphysics of presence to describe what, even in Bateson's own terms, is an "evolutionary" living system. What is called for is a postmodern ecology based not on the paradoxical notion of a stable, "identical," system preserving the idealized structure of a set of differences, or "the truth of set of descriptive propositions about the variables of the system," as I've quoted Bateson as saying, above, but a neo-structuralist ecology based on Derrida's generative notion of %differance%. This, of course, will make the "ground" of ecological and hence of literary- ecological theory more like quicksand. ^7^ Parts of this section are taken, in modified form, from my essay "Postmodern Ecology"; see Works Cited. ^8^ "The novel's title . . . recalls the discovery of America by Leif the Lucky and his fellow Vikings. For these Norsemen exiled from their homeland, Vineland represented an opportunity for a new life in a land with rich woods, white sandy beaches, grapes and vines, and a good climate," Elaine B. Safer explains in "Pynchon's World and its Legendary Past" (110). ^9^ In "On the Tube," Pynchon has a panel of experts, "including a physics professor, a psychiatrist, and a track- and-field coach . . . discussing the evolution over the years of Zoyd's technique, pointing out the useful distinction between the defenestrative personality, which prefers jumping out of windows, and the transfenestrative, which tends to jump through, each reflecting an entirely different psychic subtext . . ." (15). ^10^ "Encyclopedic narratives attempt to render the full range of knowledge and beliefs of a national culture, while identifying the ideological perspectives from which that culture shapes and interprets its knowledge," among other things, Mendelson explains in "Gravity's Encyclopedia" (30). ^11^ See _Omni_ Vol. 12, No. 9, June 1990: 22, 96. This project in artificial intelligence nicely illustrates the virtually ecological relationships among various modes of discourse. The Goddess and the Computer project demonstrates how the religious ceremonies of traditional Balinese culture, partly supplanted by the language and practice of Western development, turned out to be a valuable commentary on and careful regulator of the local ecology. This was discovered, as usual, after the society and human ecology had been so disrupted by "development" that agriculture became counterproductive and government agronomists wanted to know why. With the help of a computer model developed by a team at the University of Southern California, they discovered that development involved over- farming, and that traditional farming had been kept at an optimum level by the restraints of the ceremonies which in turn were based on careful observation of rain in the highlands and water flow to the cultivated lowlands. When the signs from Goddess, Dewi Danu, were right, the high priest said "yea" to farming. The domain of Dewi Danu happened to be that of a volcanic lake in the Balinese highlands which feeds a complex water system branching into rice fields divided by dams in the lowlands. In each group of fields, called a %subak%, there is a temple dedicated to a local god and overseen by a priest. Before letting water into the %subak%, local farmers would consult a priest who would give permission to irrigate only if he had the word from the priest of Dewi Danu's lake "on high." 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