Pynchon's ambivalence re. writing

[Hartwin Alfred Gebhardt]

> > From: <jeremias at sover.net>
> > Date: Wed, 18 Oct 1995 08:12:45 -0400
> > The point being that literature may be losing it's voice in the national
> > dialogue. If people no longer read books then the ideas and thoughts of
> > authors will have no relevance to the lives of most people. Does this even
> > matter?
> > 

Brian: 
> The authors who wish to influence the people will move on to other media.
> Literature is a medium, and not an end.  It will probably never regain the
> position it held before the mass possession of radio, movies, TV, and 
> records.  I am sure that about the time the printing press became widely 
> available, there were people who had concerns about the impact that the 
> printing press would have on the oral tradition, as passed down through 
> what we may think of as the tribal elders.  They were right; the oral 
> tradition was altered drastically and, for the most part, abandoned (over 
> a period of centuries) but ideas managed to flourish.  I am sure that thought
> will survive the dumbing down of the reading audience and the accompanying
> reaction of the publishing industry.
 
I thought I had detected a deep ambivalence in GR towards the printed 
word (esp. in the Ajtis episodes) and that a certain love / hate 
relationship with print and indeed language is one of the central 
creative tensions in Pynchon's writing.
In this light, could a broad and pervasive 'loss of literacy' in the 
developed world (not certain by any means) equally have both 'good' 
and 'bad' connotations?

hg
hag at iafrica.com