MDMD(4): Pynchon speaks!

[Doug Millison]

Reading this essay ("Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?") again now (second time
since first seeing it in the Ny York Times) added another dimension to M &
D for me. Here's some of what Pynchon had to say, 13 years ago, about a
couple of topics that seem highly relevant to our discussion of M&D:  (1)
"Age of Miracles" and the "Age of Reason"  and, (2) nested narrative
structures.

(1) "Age of Miracles" and the "Age of Reason"

"The craze for Gothic fiction after ''The Castle of Otranto'' was grounded,
I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythical time
which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and  less
literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds
of things had been possible which were no longer so. Giants, dragons,
spells. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then.
What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason,
degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an
old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being
more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human
hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation - bodily
resurrection, if possible - remained. The Methodist movement and the
American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of
resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and
Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel. Each in its way
expressed the same profound unwillingness to give up elements of faith,
however ''irrational,'' to an emerging technopolitical order that might or
might not know what it was doing. ''Gothic'' became code for ''medieval,''
and that has remained code for ''miraculous,'' on  through Pre-Raphaelites,
turn-of-the-century tarot cards, space opera in the pulps and the comics,
down to ''Star Wars'' and contemporary tales of sword and sorcery. TO
insist on the miraculous is to deny to the machine at least some of its
claims on us, to assert the limited wish that living things, earthly and
otherwise, may on occasion become Bad and Big enough to take part in
transcendent doings."

(2) On nested (Wickian?) narratives:

"Victor Frankenstein's creature also, surely, qualifies as a major literary
Badass. ''I resolved . . .,'' Victor tells us, ''to make the being of a
gigantic stature, that is to say, about eight feet in height, and
proportionably large,'' which takes care of Big. The story  of how he got
to be so Bad is the heart of the novel, sheltered innermost:  told to
Victor in the first person by the creature himself, then nested inside of
Victor's own narrative, which is nested in its turn in the letters of the
arctic explorer Robert Walton."

quotes from "Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?" (October 28, 1984)
http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html)


D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com
 Today in history (21 July):  1911. Canadian educator and social critic
Marshal McLuhan (quote: "The medium is the message") was born (d: 1980).