Pynchon's Frictional Paradigm: The Force of Yoyodyne vs. the Counterforce of W.A.S.T.E.

Abstract

The starting point of this paper can be found in the basic provisions of the 1946 US Employment Act, which are redolent of the utopian discourse stating that all the members of a particular society should be provided for. While the economy of California undoubtedly prospered in the decades after World War II and owed some of the success to federal investments in the weapons industry, the stupefying impact that large corporations had on the lives of their lower-level employees caused a subversive reaction in a group of technical staff at the giant Yoyodyne plant in The Crying of Lot 49. Their form of utopia did not venture beyond writing letters via a secret postal service within the company, and this harmless resistance served as a manner of rehumanization. Vineland presents a much more fundamental rebellion against state repression in the form of various movements on a larger scale, in an imaginary county - a film collective that shoots live documentaries on governmental repression, a martial arts sisterhood which lives in the hills, and a fierce body of students who even proclaim their own short-lived republic. The latter novel does not raise a polemic against the text of the Act so much as it portrays the practical implications of the corporate or state monopoly and the reactions to its excesses.