Occult Continents and Methodologies of Failure in Pynchon's Inherent Vice

• In Event: Merciful Failure, Delightful Disasters, and Practices of Hope

Abstract

Thomas Pynchon's 2009 novel Inherent Vice follows pothead private eye Doc's meandering journey of interpretation. Against the coming age of internet all-recoverability, Doc's traditional detective methodologies stand no chance-but rather than submit to the digitization of his field, Doc turns to imagination and accident as inventive methodologies that turn out to provide the most satisfying solutions of any in the novel. Doc's whimsical methods-which include postcards from the blue and half-forgotten memories of Ouija board sessions-are, like the rest of the novel, steeped in the occult ideology of late-60s/early-70s California. The most striking occult symbol of all these is that of the imaginary lost continent of Lemuria, whose own trajectory in the history of ideas echoes a similar methodological standoff between science and whimsy: although first invented in the mid-19th century as a convenient fiction to solve problems in existing theories of geology and evolution, Lemuria is adopted in the late 19th century by esoteric thinkers hoping to "re-enchant" a world divested of spirit by the advances of science. Conveniently claimed to be destroyed by cataclysm, no trace is left of Lemuria to either prove or disprove its existence, rendering it an unassailable rhetorical gesture to shore up otherwise defeated theories. Both of these earliest uses of Lemuria conjure the idea of a lost continent to solve a perceived crisis in systems of meaning-making. In our own contemporary crisis of methodologies, literary detectives are offered a way out of the methodological (and fiscal) emergencies of the field through treating literature as "science" and discarding the "occult-like" suspicion of close reading. But what if the solution to the "exhaustion of critique" is neither to entrench ourselves in traditional methods, nor to sell our souls to ARPAnet, but rather to embrace failure, and to respond with imaginative, whimsical solutions?
In Inherent Vice, Lemuria is mentioned only in passing, as a fleeting hope for an alternate reality untethered from historical baggage: "some undrowned Lemuria, where the American fate, mercifully, failed to transpire." But subtle allusions to the occult history of Lemuria suffuse the novel, drawing connections between characters, moments, and interpretive gestures to suggest that stumbling into coincidences may, indeed, be the best route to finding meaning, after all: perhaps the failure of traditional forms of critique is not an emergency but a "mercy." What Inherent Vice offers to critique is the merciful ruination of the misguided attempt to conquer a text by cataloging all its data or diagnosing all its symptoms. Doc's methods of interpretation in Inherent Vice, strange though they may be, offer profound lessons for our own era of disenchantment with traditional ways of reading and suggest the possibility for satisfaction emerging from a hermeneutics of failure.

Author

• Carie L Schneider, Cameron University