Thomas Pynchon and American Counterculture by Joanna Freer

Author:Joanna Freer [Freer]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Panther Theory: Dialectical Materialism and Revolutionary Suicide

Founded in Oakland, California, in 1966 by Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale, the BPP aimed to protect and gain autonomy for black communities within the United States: its ten-point platform and program demanded among other things freedom, employment, decent housing, and an end to police brutality.7 The organisation was linked to the Black Power movement, which developed out of a disaffection with the traditional pacifist civil rights activism that seemed to have taken the struggle for black rights as far as it could, but not far enough. Far from desiring integration with the capitalist system as earlier civil rights activists had, the Panthers perceived the capitalist ethos as a key cause of racism in America.8 Describing themselves as Marxist-Leninists and strongly influenced by contemporary communist leaders such as Mao Tse-tung of China and Fidel Castro of Cuba, the Panthers’ ultimate aim was a total communist revolution in American society. “Survival Programs” such as free community breakfast and transport services for prison visitors were at the centre of the BPP’s attempts to liberate black citizens from the worst effects of white oppression. Yet the organisation gained fame not through such community programmes but as a result of the particularly sensational images of the Panthers dressed in military-style uniforms and brandishing shotguns that circulated in the national news media. The firearms they carried were a practical application of the teachings of the late Malcolm X, intended to enable self-defence against the unfair treatment African American individuals were receiving at the hands of the LAPD,9 and the military uniform – black trousers, blue shirts, black leather jackets, topped off with a revolutionary black beret – was intended to underscore the group’s professionalism and unity.10 The BPP appealed to the white student organisations of the late 1960s New Left, both in making “vivid” the idea of revolution, and in their ability to embody simultaneously several currents within the white Left: as Todd Gitlin points out, “[i]n the person of the Panthers ... the anarchist impulse could be fused with the Third World mystique, the aura of violence, and the thrust for revolutionary efficiency.”11 Unfortunately, however, the group’s aggressive image and militant stance did little to endear it to either the general public or the federal government, and a huge FBI counter-intelligence operation was targeted at the group, employing tactics of infiltration, murder, and misinformation. This, combined with other factors, meant that by 1971 the organisation had been virtually wiped out.

In this chapter I suggest that the disintegration of the Black Panther Party was profoundly resonant for Pynchon, and that in Gravity’s Rainbow he examines the causes of its failure as a test case in considering the failure of that “little parenthesis of light” (IV 254) that was the sixties. In Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon does not mention the Black Panthers by name, as he does in the more recently published Inherent Vice. Here, the protagonist Doc Sportello declaims the FBI’s attempts to undermine the organisation by generating conflict

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