Pynchon, SF: TV tube

[jporter]

>>Is there some similarity between this line of Gibson's (from
>NEUROMANCER):
>>        "They sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to
>            a dead channel..."
>>>and this from CL49:
>>        "Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the dead eye
>>        of the TV tube..."
>
>CL49:
>     Looked at in one way, the greenish dead eye of the (Orwellian/
>Mcluanesque) television is what stands in for the meeting house of
> 'god's temple.' Yet  the nature of Television is that it is both
>manifestation of the will-to-atomisation present in American
> [community? ho ho ho], and one of its primary enforcing agents.
>Similarly, we find several characters wearing green bubble-shades
>in order to, presumably, distance themselves from each other and
>certain seemingly unpleasant aspects of their reality---thus making
>their participation in their own lives more like the passive non-
>activity of watching television. In the same part of the book, we also
>get Oedipa wanting to feel "as drunk as possible," further buffering
>her from her situation, which suddenly demands both recognition of
>the death of her ex-lover, and  responsibility for the material empire
>which he has left behind. It is a massive legacy which we discover,
>can perhaps only be called America. Yet Pynchon knows, like
>Waugh before him, that America does not really believe in death,
>and isn't too sure about mutual responsibility, either.
>
>     If Pynchon is here using his televisions as part of an ongoing
>image of Americans buffering themselves FROM 1) other people,
> 2) their responsibility for their own lives, and 3) perceptions of
>and engagements with the natural and built environment, what is
>Gibson doing? Perhaps polluting the distinctions between the
>tele(vision) and our visions of the 'natural world' / and the 'built
>environment'--- ("the sky above the port" etc.) For how can the
>eye nurtured by tv not relate to this world of ours as 'stranger,'
>and do so in terms learned at the (now primary) electronic breast?
>Gibson's tv's are no longer buffers and replacements for other
>things, but is the thing itself, if you will: perhaps the ironic site of
>what Lacan tells us is our earliest dialectic. And of course, it is
>cosmic earlyness (remnants of the big bang) being recorded by
>a tv "tuned to a dead channel."
>
>     Well, perhaps, anyway. Comments?
>
>E.A.Weinstein
>Centre For English Studies
>University Of London
>E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk

I would have to agree that the face off between the t.v. and Oedipa is as
significant as that between Benny Profane and the "crash dummies" he is
asigned to watch on the night shift. And both confrontations are heightened
by the irony, which Pynchon is concerned with, that Benny and Oedipa, being
fictional characters, are just as dead. The question becomes: Where is the
boundry between the living and the dead? This is explicitly asked later on
in COL49 when Pynchon peers into the assemblage of the living cell- just a
collection of chemicals after all, and is one of the major themes of the
book, with respect to the second law of thermodynamics: it's all a matter
of perception. It is not just beauty which is determined by the eye of the
beholder.

In Gibson, the character has, apparently, crossed the boundry and entered
the "artificial" world, and irony is no longer a consideration. Theme has
gone over to plot, and the author makes it clear that Neuromancer,
Wintergreen, Cyberspace itself (considering the whole trilogy here) are as
alive as any of the characters. The Turing Police are doomed to failure,
because the AI's, are more "in sync" with the "natural forces" that gave
rise to human intelligence in the first place. I think it possible that
Gibson is admitting the exisitence of a teological influence at work in the
progression of technology toward consciousness.

regards, jp