From the V-2 Rocket to Vaucanson's Duck

[Dave Monroe]

And again from Joseph Tabbi, Cognitive Fictions
(Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2002), Ch. 2, "Mapping
the Cor(e)tex(t): Thomas Pynchon," pp. 25-53 ...

>From the V-2 Rocket to Vaucanson's Duck (pp. 47-53)

"I have been arguing that the majority of characters
in Pynchon's novels, and not a few of Pynchon's
contemporaries in cultural theory, share Mason's
restless impulse towards a planetary cosnsciousness in
which everything becomes readable as a text and the
deepest inside--the unconscious--gets projected
outside and made known at a higher level.  More often
than not, these 'total loops' are propelled by panic,
in compensation for a character's fragmented nowledge
and experience oif a diminished autonomy and uncertain
spirituality.  Instead of assuming the dispersed
notion of control that is consistent with the media
and social forces that threaten the liberal,
possessive model of individuality, Pynchon's
characters retain the idea of a centralized control
and reconsolidate it within these same media.  When
control has left the individual subject, signs of
control can be read everywhere else, in all the
'pathways and messages outside the body' that for 
Bateson open the boundaries of the slef and eliminate
distinctions between observer and observed (Steps to
an Ecology of Mind 460; cited in Wolfe, 'In Search'
50).  Yet, instead of Bateson's awe at these total
loops of interconnection, resentment is the emotion
most often felt by Pynchon's characters and narrators,
both human and inhuman.
   "It is 'worldy Resentment,' after all, that propels
the mechanical duck designed by Vaucanson into ever
more refined levelsof consciousness.  The duck, which
Martin Saar and Christian Skirke read as a complex
amalgan of dream machine, hybrid creature, and the
'mad eroticism of technology,' is Mason & Dixon's V-2
rocket.  That the duck becomes a projectile and a
satellite, at the elast, is undeniable. Pynchon's
closest stand-in for a modern-day French theorist and
the object of the duck's affections, explains the
phenomenon of the duck's invisibility thus:

'...As her Metaphysickal Powers increase, so do her
worldly Resentments, real and imagin'd, the shape of
her Destiny pull'd Earthward and rising Heavenward at
teh same time,--meanwhile gaining an order of
Magnitude, in passing from the personal to the
Continental.  If not the Planetary.'  Perhaps
fortunately, no one present has any idea what he is
talking about. (Mason & Dixon 449)

Resentment, as Saar and Skirke point out, grows from
'technology's desire to be human'--a desire that, once
frustrated, turns instead toward material
transcendence.  Yet there is an importantdifference
between the styles of transcendence in Pynchon's early
and later work: the V-2 in Gravity's Rainbow is
generally coded along a vertical axis, between the
promise of transcendence and the pull of gravity, and
meaning is approached either centripetally (from the
book's cortex to a buried core text) or centrifugally
(as in the ultimate scattering of Slothrop).  A
hunanist resiliance makes Pynchon's early characters
especially prone to all-or-nothing accounts of
impersonal power ....  Such alterations between inside
and outside, and the ontological uncertainty about
where the self is bounded and whre conscious control
gives way to impersonal force, are what render many of
the characters in Gravity's Rainbow paranoid about,
and ultimately desiring to be overwhelmed by, an
all-penetrating power.
   'In Mason & Dixon, the centripetal and centrifugal
ae held in balance: as the duck vibrates itself into
transcendence, the vertical dimension cancels itself
out in a horizontality that is 'Continental' in its
proportions.... according to Brian McHale, 'the
reorientation from the vertical to the horizontal
axis' is a distinguishing feature of Pynchon's
poetics: 'In place of the vertical "Chain of Being"
[...] Mason & Dixon propeoses the horizontal
democratic chain of the surveyors' practice [...]'
(abstract to 'Mason and Dixon in the Zone').  Even in
otherworldly passages ... horizontality dominates and
motion is along the earth's surface, not above or
below.  The other world lies alongside or ahead of
this world ...." (pp. 47-8)

Citing ...

Bateson, Gregory.  Steps to an Ecology of Mind.
   New York: Ballatine, 1972.

McHale, Brian.  "Mason and Dixon in the Zone."
   Paper read at the Programme for International
   Pynchon Sudies, London (June 1988).

(and see as well here ...

__________.  "Mason & Dixon in the Zone, or, a
   Brief Poetics of Pynchon-Space."  Pynchon and
   Mason & Dixon.  Ed. Brooke Horvath and Irving
   Malin.  Newark: U of Delaware P, 2002.)

Saar, Martin and Christian Skirke.  "The 'Realm of
   Velocity and Spleen': Reading Hybrid Life in Mason
   & Dixon."  Paper read at the Programme for
   International Pynchon Sudies, London (June 1988).

Wolfe, Cary.  "In Search of Post-Humanist Theory:
   The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and
   Varela."  Cultural Critique (Spring 1995): 33-70.

__________________________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now.
http://mailplus.yahoo.com