V.V. 3--McClintic Sphere and Inanimateness

[Dave Monroe]

... of course, whilst we might indeed always already be Borg(ed), we are
not always so (cy)borged in the same way, at the same time, at the same
place, there is certainly history, there are certainly histories, to
attend to here, and this I think is what those Pynchonian texts are
attending to, attentive of, mapping that history, those histories.
Cybernetics, petrochemicals, surveillance ...

A question for the class: what sort of development(s) do those
Pynchonian texts display?  I can't say I've been much contemplating the
question myself, but I do think that Something Happened betwixt V. and
Gravity's Rainbow.  The 60s for starters, The Crying of Lot 49 for
certain.  Wonder perhaps if, indeed, The Crying of Lot 49, and, in
particular, the hermeneutic tribulations of Oedipa Maas, is not
symptomatic of this ...

Relativism?  Circumspection, rather, I think.   Hence those noted,
notorious uncertainties, ambivalences, indeterminacies, whatever.
Complexities.  Complications.  The feeling that Something is, indeed,
being Said, but that the difficulties involved in said Saying are
simulataneously being taken into consideration, being spoken alongside.
Question is, what is that Something?  But, certainly, no text exists
without contexts, can expect not to accrue them, certainly not ...

But there's a history of the wind to be written, esp. in re: those
fabled 1960s, no?  "The answer my friend ...," "You don't need a
weatherman to know which way ...," culminating, perhaps, perhaps
nihilistically, in those post-Vietnam, post-Watergate, post-60s 70s,
"All we are is dust in the ..."?   A Trope, a Sign of The Times, to be
sure.   And in light of both latent existentialism and the nascent
ecological movement ...