Eddins, "Depraved New World"

Sat Dec 2 12:43:33 CST 2000

On Sat, 2 Dec 2000, Terrance wrote:

> "The current critical consensus seems to be, that these
> quests are epistemological missions impossible, finally
> foundering---as they must---in undecidability; and that the
> general revelation of the cul-de-sac, along with the
> intimations that a provisional middle ground can be found
> and occupied constitutes the unifying theme of Pynchon's
> fiction. The postmodern secularity of this reading, however,
> does violence to the complex religious dialectic that serves
> as the fiction's metastructure."
> 
> Eddins, GP.14
> 
> "Margherita Erdmann can recognize Blicero as the
> post-Newtonian Other who, like his predecessor V., has "no
> humanity left in his eyes..." 

	Not quite sure what Eddins' getting at here. Actually, Newton had
a
lot of humanism in him, just that he was so fucked up (with probably the
biggest God complex the world has ever known) it never really showed.
What, for instance, is the post-Newtonian other? For one, if there is a
post-Newtonian other then you can't do without Newton, who, basically, not
only founded modern physics and mathematics (including the masterstroke of
inventing calculus with out which we'd all be scribbling around in the
dark). Something which Pynchon, given his engineering background must have
known about. I would argue that even if he didn't like Newton, Pynchon
knew how important Newton was. To be honest I think a more fruitful
comparison would be between Newton and Goethe (especially the rival colour
theories, both of which work, by the way - though only Newton is right),
especially Goethe's fusion of Rationalism and Emotionalism (and look where
that got Faust) 

> William M. Platter GP.38
> 
> Not how Eddins reads Blicero's eyes, the maps, the wolf, the
> scream. 
> 
> Neither reading is convincing, but this Not because the
> symbolism is in the eye of the beholder.
> 
> Alice: "The question is, Henry Adams."
> 
> Humpty Dumpty: "A rose is a rose is a rose...."
> 
> Alice: "We're painting the roses red." 
> 
> Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
> America. New York: Atheneum, 1961.
> Eco, Umberto. "Postmodernism, Irony, the Enjoyable."
> Postscript to the Name of the Rose. New York: HBJ, 1984.
> 
> Lecture 4. Leslie Fiedler's Theory of American Literature
> (from Love and  Death in the American Novel [1960]) 
> 
> The thesis: that, at its core, American literature
> represents a flight from women; that in many of our most 
> essential works we find, again and again, men fleeing from
> the often intimidating and restrictive  influence of women
> toward the freedom of the wilderness, where they establish a
> "homoerotic" bond  (take note: this is not the same thing as
> "homosexual"; the word refers to the sort of extraordinary 
> friendship we see, for example, among male athletes) with a
> non-white/non-civilized "other." 

	erm, hello Roger Mexico? And what about the freedom of 
Blicero and young German officer (forgive me I read GR a while ago)

> 
> http://www.mtsu.edu/~english/221/Syllabus/221OnlineLectures.html#Introductory
> Lecture
> 
> 
> The literary marketplace has always had three essential
> elements: authorship, publishing and audience. Each of these
> has been shaped by market forces from the very beginning,
> and each in its own
> way has mirrored the successive phases of Western capitalism
> -- pre-industrial/pre-modern, industrial/modern and, in the
> last fifty years,
> post-industrial and postmodern. Our immediate concern is
> with the literary marketplace in the last of these phases,
> but as we consider how that market has changed since World
> War II, it will be important to keep in mind that at least
> some of its features are perennial. 
> 
> http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/~jmu2m/book.market-2.html
> 
> After the Great Divide  By Andreas Huyssen 
> 
> http://www.indiana.edu/~iupress/books/0-253-20399-6tc.html
> 

> McHale goes on to discuss John Barth's theory (or theories:
> one of a literature of exhaustion and one of a literature of
> replenishment) of 'late modernism' in
> relation to Borges, Calvino, and Nabokov. 
> 
> http://www.hku.hk/english/course/03354/introma2.htm
> 
> As recently as the 1960s, historians and social theorists
> insisted that modernization and secularization were
> inseparable. In addition to the shift of social, political,
> and economic power from church to state, advances in modern
> science and technology led to the gradual disenchantment of
> the world and experience in it. In the mechanistic  universe
> defined by Descartes and described in encyclopedic detail by
> Enlightenment philosophers, there seemed to be little room
> for either divinity or things divine. With the supernatural
> in full retreat, God first withdrew to a deistic heaven to
> watch His creation from afar and then seemed to disappear
> from the lives of His erstwhile followers. From this point
> of view, as modernity waxes, religion seems to wane.  But
> matters are considerably more complex than this
> unidirectional line of historical development suggests. 
> 
> http://www.press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/791572.html#excerpt
> 
> 
> "The Dismemberment of Orpheus: Reflections on Modern
> Culture, Language and Literature."
> American Scholar (Summer 1963), 32(3): 463-484.
> 
> "The Futility Corner." Review of Thomas Pynchon's V.
> Saturday Review (March 23,1963), 46(12): 44. 
> 
> http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~eyeghiay/hassan/index.html
> 
> The world described by classical dynamics was for many
> easily compared to a clock
> in which the regular patterns of behavior could be
> understood and were, accordingly, quite predictable. Chaos
> theory argues that most of the physical world is not like a
> clock: to use Karl Popper's famous phrase, there are more
> clouds than clocks in the world. The great complexity
> evident in the various systems that constitute the world --
> on all levels, from the very small to the very large -- are
> so sensitive to circumstance that they are intrinsically
> unpredictable. Polkinghorne thinks that term "chaos" is
> unfortunate because the apparent haphazardness does occur
> within restricted domains of possibility. "The most obvious
> thing to say about chaotic systems is that they are
> intrinsically unpredictable. Their exquisite sensitivity
> means that we can never know enough to be able to predict
> with any long-term reliability how they will behave."(9)
> Polkinghorne argues that the epistemological limitations
> which chaos theory presents point to a fundamental feature
> of the world, what he calls an "ontological openness." 
> I want to say that the physical world is open in its
> process, that the future is not just a tautologous
> spelling-out of what was already implicit in the past, but
> there is genuine novelty, genuine becoming, in the history
> of the universe. . . . The dead hand of the Laplacean
> Calculator is relaxed and there is scope for forms of
> causality other than the energetic transactions of current
> physical theory. As we shall see there is room for the
> operation of holistic organizing principles (presently
> unknown to us, but in principle open to scientific
> discernment), for
> human intentionality, and for divine providential
> interaction. The character of such
> influence is perhaps best conceived as 'active
> information,'(10) the creation of novel
> forms carried by a flexible material substrate.(11)  Thus
> chaos theory presents us with the possibility of "a
> metaphysically attractive option of openness, a causal grid
> from below which delineates an envelope of possibility (it
> is not the case that anything can happen but many things
> can), within which there remains room for manoeuvre."(12)

	Major problem with this is that in the end, you will always do
what you were always going to do, and though pre-ordination is not
pre-determination, in the end I guess we're never really free. But, does
this matter?

	And let's be careful about this craze for applying new scientific
discoveries to literature. No novelist is a scientist, so I'd be careful
about how much you believe in what an author's saying. This is not to say 
that we should just listen to the scientists.	After all, no scientist is
a novelist.

 yours (thinking very much on the hop)
Mark 