double-dog darin' the sun

[Terrance]

> 
> First, a bit of GR:
> 
> "Byron, as he burns on, sees more and more of this pattern.  He learns how to
> make contact with other kinds of electric appliances, in homes, in factories
> and out in the streets.  Each has something to tell him.  The pattern gathers
> in his soul (Seele, as the core of the earlier carbon filament was known in
> Germany), and the grander and clearer it grows, the more desperate Byron
> gets.  Someday he will know everything, and still be as impotent as before.
> His youthful dreams of organizing all the bulbs in the world seem impossible
> now--the Grid is wide open, all messages can be overheard, and there are more
> than enough traitors out on the line.  Prophets traditionally don't last
> long--they are either killed outright, or given an accident serious enough to
> make them stop and think, and most often they do pull back.  But on Byron has
> been visited an even better fate.  He is condemned to go on forever, knowing
> the truth and powerless to change anything.  No longer will he seek to get
> off the wheel.  His anger and frustation will grow without limit, and he will
> find himself, poor perverse bulb, enjoying it. . . ."

Now explain to me how you can read this and Pynchon's use of
McLuhan and not conclude that Doubting Thomas is a cynic? 

The introduction of scientific utilitarian values AND modes
of thinking into the world of personal choice between good
and evil has resulted in values that cease to be personal
and have become identified ONLY with the usefulness or
destructiveness of social systems and material things. And
for Doubting Thomas, and this clearly distinguishes him from
his Anglo-American modernist cousins--Joyce, Eliot, Yeats,
Pound, Hemingway and Williams, modern man is not only
alienated from the world,  cut off from or divided, in
perception and consciousness, environment, and cultural
traditions, but there is NO possibility of return or some
radical reconfiguration that would get man back to and
undivided ORAL consciousness and the undivided cultural,
environmental, life. It was the hope of the Modern prophets
that somehow, ELECTRONICALLY some thought, technologically,
linguistically, man would throw off the manacles of the
modern mind and rise up to abolish the tyranny of literacy
and create a NEW undivided, "whole" consciousness. Pynchon
is two steps back past Joyce and Yeats, back to the garden,
back to the oral, the undivided consciousness, but it's only
a  nostalgia that may turn a little more positive in VL, but
here is full of pain, anxiety, and despair, so enjoy it if
you can. Unless, some double irony where the knotting into
is also a liberation from the gnostic nightmare?  

Pynchon debt to McLuhan is huge, he's all over the book. 
Marshall McLuhan's Books 

1951  The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man
(Vanguard Press)
1962  The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man
(University of Toronto Press)
1964  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
(McGraw-Hill)
1967  Verbi-Voco-Visual Explorations (Something Else Press)
1967  Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (Random
House/1989 Simon and Schuster)
1968  War and Peace in the Global Village *with Quentin
Fiore (McGraw Hill/1989 Simon and Schuster)
1968  Through the Vanishing Point: Space in Poetry and in
Painting *with Harley Parker (Harper and Row: World
Perspective Series Vol 37)
1969  Counterblast * with Harley Parker  (McClelland and
Stewart)
1970  From Cliche to Archetype *with Wilfred Watson (Viking)
1970  Culture is Our Business (McGraw-Hill)
1972  Take Today: The Executive as Drop-out (Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich)
1977  City as Classroom: Understanding Language and Media
*with Kathryn Hutchon and Eric McLuhan (Book Society of
Canada Limited)
**** Posthumous books
1988  Laws of Media: The New Science *with Eric McLuhan
(University of Toronto Press)
1989  The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and
Media in the 21st Century *with Bruce R. Powers (Oxford
University Press)