The 5th Novel

[jporter]

The New Year brings us hope and the possibilty of a new Pynchon novel. I
offer, as if in sypmpathetic ritual, symmetrical speculations on possible
themes and settings, hoping to hasten, somehow, its eagerly awaited
release...

TRP may well descend from a long line of dyed in the wool Yankees, founded
by one: William Pynchon, who settled in Western Massachussetts in the mid
1600's, along the banks of the Connecticut River. Originally involved in
the fur trade, farming, and generally hassling the natives and despoiling
the environment, they may have invested early in the nascent textile
industry of Massachussetts.

Thus a connection, via the Luddite article oft discussed here, begins to
appear. The original Luddites in England, you'll recall, were at best,
ambivalent towards the mechanization of the textile industry: King Lud, The
Bad, verses the concentration of capital and manpower equivalents compacted
in The Machine. At that time, in America, Massachussetts was the center of
the textile industry.

Along with the rest of the Anglophillic Federalist Yankees of New England,
Massachussetts was in near violent opposition to the Francophile Jefferson,
and his Embargo Act of 1807, which predictably failed to prevent The War of
1812. But the embargo and the war actually turned out to have an
unexpectedly favorable effect on the Yankee economy. English manufactured
goods were shut out, and the fledgling nation had to develop its own
industry. These enterprises tended to be concentrated in New England, where
there was a surplus of cheap but skilled labor- especially in
Massachusetts. By 1816, the once Anglophillic Yankees were supporting
protective tariffs against English goods.

Another Massachussettan: Francis Cabot Lowell, went to England, about 1810,
and stole the general design of the Luddites worst nightmare: the power
loom. He smuggled it back to Massachusetts, and, along with Peter Moody,
perfected its design. Then, with Patrick Jackson and Nathan Appleton, they
formed the Boston Manufacturing Company. In 1814, while Andy Jackson was in
New Orleans, handing General Pakenham his English behind, BMC was building
in Massachussetts the first factory in America (and the world!) to perform,
in a single manufacturing process, all the operations necessary to convert
raw cotton into cloth.

While in Scotland, Lowell had been favorably influenced by Robert Owen's
efforts to address the social needs of mill workers. Owen attempted to
ensure adequate housing, education, and a decent store for the community of
workers he employed.  Lowell, however, pushed Owen's concept of Paternalism
even further, erecting boarding houses, especially designed for his workers
of choice: young, single women. He enforced a curfew to ensure their, ahem,
morality, not to mention any unnecessary dalliance away from their service
to The Machines.

Dickens, among other foreign dignitaries, was notably impressed by one of
Lowell's experimental communities, named by that time after its founder,
but popularly known as "the Manchester of America" and "Spindle City."
Certainly, all was  not quite as rosey in Lowell as the apologists would
have the world believe. And finally, by the time of Kerouac's birth there,
in 1922, it had gone to seed.

While Lowell, Mass, was playing an important role in the origins of the
American  textile industry- and industrial design in general- Paterson, New
Jersey, was becoming what might be the woof for several other pynchonesque
threads:

Probably the first planned city, with its own impressive mills, powered by
the great falls on the Passaic River, Paterson became known as the "Silk
City." Originally, Paterson was the brainchild of THE Federalist: Alexander
Hamilton, and the Society for Establishing Useful Manufactures, known as
SUM (but I think of: THEM). They controlled all of the water power, and
leased all of the building space. Hamilton, according to Carlos Williams,
would have made Paterson the capital of the new nation- if he'd had his way
("Hamiltonia," Williams claims he would have called it) and would've kept
it all well under the control of *The Company*. Extremely intelligent and
hardworking, Hamilton was the consummate political trickster, and was the
arch political and philosophical rival of Thomas Jefferson. Their rivalry
representing, supposedly, The Fundamental American Political Duality. But
by the time Burr shot Hamilton, Jefferson had already removed the dagger
from Burr's back.

As if to spite its Federalist Father, Paterson became the site of the first
recorded sympathy strike in American labor history, when in 1828, mechanics
teamed up with striking mill workers. Therafter, labor organizing, often
led by women, continued in the Silk City for the better part of 100 years.
On a more sinister note, it was in Paterson, in 1836, that Samuel Colt's
Gun Mill produced his first Colt revolvers. By 1842, his business would
fail. But, in an act foreshadowing Ike's concerns over a century later,
Colt's grim business was resuscitated in 1847, when the U.S. government,
having received reports of the Colt's efficacy in dispatching The Indian,
ordered 1000 revolving breech pistols for use by Polk and Taylor against
The Mexican.

Colt would take his new found wealth to Connecticut, there teaming with Eli
Whitney, Jr., son of the inventor of the cotton gin-  a minor achievement
compared with Whitney Sr.'s developement, by 1801, of the interchangeable
part and the techniques of mass production. These enabled precision
products, previously requiring a craftsman's skill from start to finish, to
be assembled piecemeal- by line workers with no special skills. Whitney,
Sr., passed these techniques on to his son. Then, Jr.and Colt set out to
design and construct the first truly modern arms factory. They used mass
production techniques and interchangeable parts, well before Henry Ford, or
any of the I.G.'s for that matter.

Meanwhile, after the Civil War, back in Paterson, John Holland, previously
of Limerick, Ire., designed and constructed the first successful modern
submarine: The FENIAN RAM. It worked well, using batteries developed (I
think) by Colt, until it sank, in 1881, in the the Passaic River.  [Ed.'s
Note: Check out "FENIAN" and become submerged in a river of myth]  A
connection involving these characters can be drawn from Paterson to Groton,
Ct., where THAT Connecticut River flows into Long Island Sound. Groton
became one of the homes of the Electric Boat Company, builder, in 1900, of
the first government contracted submarine, appropriately named: "The
Holland."  E Boat continued to perfect its deadly craft, until a century or
so after Holland's FENIAN RAM, around 1980, it finished the first of the
Ohio Class submarines: the world ending Tridents.

Finally, as if sensing somehow its own long coming decline, but not to be
out done by Lowell's belated offering of Jack Kerouac, Paterson, in the
1930's, adopted and nurtured the young Allen Ginsberg.

Now, lacing this lint, picked- not so randomly- from history's pocket:

Yankee ingenuity and despoliation, stolen plans for machines that weave,
premeditated cities, THEM, industrial design, dormitories of young single
women, rivers of power, Cities of Silk and Spindles, sunken mythic
submarines, mass production, the labor movement, guns, interchangeable
enemies, government contracts, more guns, more submarines, growth, decline,
decay, Kerouac, Ginsberg:

what vaticinations of things to come come issuing through the flickering mind?


Jody Porter
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Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city          (William Carlos Williams, THE GREAT FIGURE.)