MDMD(4) p.123 small re-write

[David Casseres]

>...Being is given to what in the normal scheme
>of things cannot exist, in this case the sound shadow.
>Oh, that Pynch.

Oh yes.  I'd just add that Pynchon is never doing anything as simple as 
trying to represent scientific ideas scientifically, any more than he 
tries to provide a history of the V2 program or even of the Herero 
genocide in Sudwestafrika.  Rather, he takes the history or the science 
as a given, and then uses it as a way of advancing some larger purpose.

Granted, in V. he wants us to learn some basic facts about this 
particularly striking (but not unique) instance of brutal European 
colonization in Africa, but he's really after the whole human phenomenon 
of colonization of the defenseless by the powerful.  In Gravity's Rainbow 
he's really more interested in the *idea* of the Rocket than in how it 
worked.  He has characters conducting scientific/technological 
discussions more to indicate the state of mind -- the priorities and 
assumptions -- of postindustrial warriors than to convey the technical 
issues they are discussing.  The depth of Pynchon's interest in science 
itself, I suspect, is limited to learning enough to write those 
conversations with some authenticity.

There's a wonderful passage in Gravity's Rainbow about Kekule's famous 
dream of the serpent with its tail in its mouth, which supposedly 
revealed to him the structure of the aromatic hydrocarbons.  Pynchon's 
point here is not to tell us anything about chemistry -- it's to deliver 
a sermon on the abandonment of a tradition of spiritual revelation 
through the poetic imagery of dreams, in favor of the industrial habit of 
seeing any revelation as a clue to physical structure that can be 
exploited for power and wealth; the IG chemists eventually reduce the 
serpent image into little shiny hexagons that they wear as jewelry to 
signify their connection to the ongoing triumph of chemical synthesis.  
It's one of the places where I seem to hear Pynchon stepping forward to 
speak his own opinions directly to the audience, in his own voice.

And of course, Kekule's discovery of the cyclic structure and the 
resonant bond that makes it possible is beautiful in its own right as 
pure science, and the scientist-manque in me cringes slightly at 
Pynchon's Luddite indignation; but Pynchon's agenda is what it is, and 
one of the things Pynchon tells us is that the beauty of science and 
technology -- what Oppenheimer called "technical sweetness" -- does not 
exist in a vacuum and cannot be separated from its intimate involvement 
in wealth, power, business, government, war, and so forth.  And for that 
reason it must, in a novel, be discussed metaphorically and morally and 
emotionally.  To do this without falling into cocktail-party philosophy 
is an extremely difficult feat, and I can't think of any other writer who 
even tries to the extent that Pynchon does, let alone succeeding as 
Pynchon does.


Cheers,
David