CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

By: Michael Grasso
March 11, 2026

One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.

From Paul Thomas Anderson’s 2014 adaptation of *Inherent Vice*

PYNCHONIAN RESISTANCE

For a writer so finely attuned to the interlocking mechanisms of capitalist fascism’s world-system, Thomas Pynchon’s depictions of resistance to that system are markedly… slippery, ephemeral. Maybe this is just radical truth-telling; that true resistance to fascism can only congeal in the dark interstices of life under fascism. In Pynchon’s novels, individuals — often socially and spiritually atomized by capitalist accumulation’s fascist death-drive — must operate under threat of cajolement, co-optation, material temptation to betray one’s comrades, sinister scientific projects to control mind and body, exploitation of emotional and sexual fetishes, and good old-fashioned violent intimidation.

Pynchon’s 1973 masterwork, Gravity’s Rainbow, uses the months surrounding the “defeat” of Nazi Germany in 1945 to explore the connections between the men at the top of the Third Reich and the putative “other side”: Allied corporate conspiracies profiting from the war and scooping up the scientists who will go on to form the scientific elite of Cold War America. But individual members on the British-American side of the war come to a sobering realization throughout the novel — “the real business of the War is buying and selling… the true war is a celebration of markets” — and join a loose confederation of the living and quasi-dead known as the Counterforce. The Counterforce are clued-in, justified in and united by their paranoia, finding hope in ecological ideas, the big bold bustle of life, reasserting the natural cycles that have been short-circuited by the extractive, polluting sciences of chemistry, rocketry, and warfare… the Rocket’s inexorable pointing toward an End of History in nuclear fire.

There’s an extended excerpt of Gravity’s Rainbow that I’ve taken to posting when I’m feeling especially drained from the constant assault of patriarchal capitalist fascism in 2026. Father Rapier, a Jesuit and adherent of the eschatological teachings of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, is ruminating on the seemingly-immortal systems of control that surround them. Rapier’s preternatural feelers allow him a glimpse of The Bomb’s “critical mass” (“heard… only in superhepcat-to-hepcat exchanges”) and of a future system where “once the technical means of control have reached… a certain degree of being connected one to another, the chances for freedom are over for good.” If the elites do not fear death, neither must we in resistance to Them: “Perhaps we will choose instead to turn, to fight… For every kind of vampire, there is a kind of cross.”

While the Counterforce may be ephemeral, the anti-fascist fighters in Pynchon’s Gilded Age picaresque Against the Day (2006) wield revolvers and dynamite against the bosses. In the Wild West family feud of the Vibes (capitalist mine-owners) and the Traverses (workers and Wobblies). In 1990’s Vineland, Pynchon lays bare how the overt class conflict of the Gilded Age was swept into the 20th century’s more muted, underground class war. A Traverse descendant, Frenesi Gates, joins a countercultural film collective on campus in the late Sixties. The “24fps” collective films a student rebellion, “the People’s Republic of Rock and Roll,” spontaneously arising during a marijuana smoke-in-triggered crackdown at a conservative college campus. The movement chooses its leader, apolitical mathematics professor Weed Atman, because he’s the tallest person in the crowd (“I’m just tall, that’s all,” pleads Atman). Frenesi ends up getting compromised by her fetish for male authority figures and becomes a snitch, giving up Atman, who ends up going the way of many Sixties rebels in Vineland, getting hypnotized by “the Tube” (television) into becoming a not-quite-living-or-dead “Thanatoid” in the Reaganite Eighties.

In Pynchon’s late career, he’s turned his interest in the quintessentially class-liminal American figure of the private dick. Pynchon’s recent detectives span the 20th century: Sixties stoner P.I. Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice (2009), early-’00s forensic accountant Maxine Tarnow in Bleeding Edge (2013), and Depression-era ex-Pinkerton Hicks McTaggart in Pynchon’s latest, Shadow Ticket (2025). All possess the signifiers of a classic noir detective: a soft spot for the underdog, a nose for mystery, and the ability to slip between class milieus high and low. Doc sees the P.I. as the logical cultural counterforce to the Nixon-era fascists’ servants in the police: “The tube is saturated with fuckin cop shows… get the viewer population so cop-happy they’re beggin to be run in.” Maxine investigates the nascent “dot-com” scene in 2001 and finds herself contemplating conspiratorial signals in the aftermath of 9/11: was it all, from the Internet to the World Trade Center, an inside job to secure fascist rule and a new eternal war in celebration of markets? McTaggart’s case opens up from a simple missing persons case into confronting the 1930s’ worldwide fascist movement as he ends up in middle Europe seeing first-hand the rise of fascism… only to return home to a “Business Plot” that threatens to turn Depression-era America to the same end as Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.

Where’s the hope in victory amidst all this compromise, surrender, and ephemerality? Pynchon locates it in those rare moments of solidarity among the “preterite,” those un-saved in Protestant eschatology. The Traverse family picnic at the end of Vineland offers a life-affirming anti-fascist idyll and hope for the future in the midst of Reagan’s helicopters scanning the redwoods for marijuana farms, passing word to the next generation of “the old reliable names good for hours of contention… Hitler, Roosevelt, Kennedy, Nixon, Hoover, Mafia, CIA, Reagan, Kissinger.” The Counterforce wanders the junkyards of postwar Europe becoming grit in the wheels of corporate-military consolidation. Doc mercifully saves a hapless snitch from a fate worse than death as one of Nixon’s dirty tricksters. As is typical of Pynchon, he sums it up in a bit of doggerel song lyrics in Gravity’s Rainbow, a “counterforce traveling song” that states no matter how much the capitalist-fascist elite try to turn the preterite into meek trusting sheep, the opportunity for violent upheaval and a “chance of renewal, some dialectic, still operating in history,” in Father Rapier’s words, still exists:

They’ve been sleeping on your shoulder,
They’ve been crying in your beer,
And They’ve sung you all Their sad lullabies,
And you thought They wanted sympathy and didn’t care for souls,
And They never were about to put you wise.
But I’m telling you today,
That it ain’t the only way,
And there’s shit you won’t be eating any more—
They’ve been paying you to love it,
But the time has come to shove it,
And it isn’t a resistance, it’s a war.

***

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CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (20)

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