Keith O’Neill (SUNY, Dutchess)
Late in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, Doc Sportello takes in the Saturday horror movie, “Val Lewton’s I Walked With a Zombie (1943), hosted by subcultural superstar Larry Vincent, aka ‘Seymour,’ who liked to address his population of faithful viewers as ‘fringees’ and also hosted the annual Halloween show at the Wiltern Theater, which Doc tried never to miss” (261). It’s a relatively innocuous moment in the novel, and yet it repeats a curious pattern found throughout the text, a series of references to monsters. All through the book, there are examples: Bigfoot, Wolfman(n), “Ghidrah, the Three-Headed Monster” (281), and especially the vampire. From references to Bram Stoker’s Dracula to metonyms in the form of the Golden Fang, vampires pervade Inherent Vice. Not long before Sportello watches the Saturday horror movie, he hears that Inez “can’t get enough of that Jonathan Frid” (233). Frid, as Doc reminds us, was “the vampire guy on Dark Shadows,” the cult soap opera know for its bizarre storylines and gradual “descent” into supernatural and horror elements. Though Dark Shadows began as a conventional televised drama, it quickly began including ghosts, werewolves, and especially vampires, such as Frid’s character Barnabas. It isn’t surprising that Pynchon would pay homage to a television series that “fell” into the horror genre; one could read Pynchon’s novels as a kind of irresponsible “degradation” into what Pynchon once referred to as the ghettos of genre fiction. In “Is it O.K. to be a Luddite?” Pynchon argues that the gothic, like the western and science fiction, was “judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town” in “the great City of Literature.” Interestingly, this aesthetic “flaw” in embedded in the title of his latest novel. The “inherent vice” of Pynchon’s work is precisely its move from addressing serious—academic, literary—audiences to the “fringees” of pulp, science fiction, and especially horror writing. If the gothic is, as Pynchon claims, “confined to its own part of town,” it is also a place free from the pressures of “serious” critical appreciation. This paper attempts to trace and highlight Pynchon’s monster references, arguing for a reading of the novel not as “hippie noir”—a neo-genre that virtually every assessment of the novel mentions—but as a “hippie” gothic. (If there is a precedent to a late 60’s detective story with horror elements, it is original Scooby Doo animated series, which is of course another “Insufficiently Serious” source, one that is alluded to repeatedly in the book.) Along the way, we will look at gothic elements in Pynchon’s other novels, from Grigori the Octopus in Gravity’s Rainbow to Thanatoids in Vineland and the mysterious city-destroying creature in Against the Day.