Marshall McLuhan & Pynchon

[Jeff Meikle]

I've been lurking about 6 months now after not subscribing for a long 
time.  Guess I just can't keep quiet with the subject of McLuhan up 
for grabs.  I don't see how Lot 49 could have been written without a 
heavy investment in McLuhan.  The whole entropy/information equation 
(both mathematical and metaphorical) is just too important in both 
McLuhan and Pynchon.  Think of Oedipa projecting a world that 
otherwise is dissolving in entropic chaos.  In V. Henry Adams is 
invoked for his belief expressed in 1905 that the release of 
incredible mechanical and electrical energies by the human race was 
contributing to a general increase in entropy, disorder, chaos, 
enervation.  Adams also wrote a booklet, "A Letter to American 
Teachers of History," purporting to show that the building up of 
order through evolution was a myth; in fact, he argued, the rise of 
mental power and civilization represented devolution, a weakening of 
formerly strong intuitive and primal energies.  At that point McLuhan 
comes on board.  For him the Gutenberg world of print is exactly the 
world Adams portrays.  For McLuhan, print created individualism, 
fragmentation of points of view, leading to the clash of 
nationalisms, mass production, increasing chaos, etc.  But the shift 
from socially explosive mechanical technologies to integrative 
electric (his word) technologies reverses this fragmentation, this 
increase in social entropy.  Information technologies integrate 
people in a global village.  While print had forced people to rely on 
the visual, and on separate points of view, aural and tactile modes 
of communication like radio and television wash over people, creating 
holistic fields, uniting disparate societies, producing situations in 
which, I think I'm paraphrasing Mucho Maas, everyone who says the 
phrase "rich chocolaty goodness" is communing timelessly with 
everyone who has ever said it.   McLuhan believed computers would 
enable us to translate all languages simultaneously and eventually 
move us beyond language to instantaneous telepathic communication, 
becoming one vast mind, like his guru Teilhard de Chardin's 
anti-entropic noospheric Omega Point--a state Oedipa fears when she 
experiences a hint of it while dancing with the ballroom of deaf 
people who are moving effortlessly in time to music they can't hear. 
V. is (among many other things), a meditation on Henry Adams.  Lot 49 
is (among many other things) an extrapolation from classic 
information theory (you've gotta say "Edna Mosh" to have it come out 
"Oedipa Maas" on the radio) and an exploration of many things 
suggested by McLuhan.  I think Pynchon was genuinely struck by the 
way in which McLuhan claimed to reverse all those tired old entropic 
fantasies of collapse of empire, and he (Pynchon) was using Lot 49 
to work out some of his own reactions to McLuhan's ideas. 
Ultimately, Oedipa fears any further revelations, lest she become 
subsumed into the Trystero.  She avoids Hilarious's identity 
dissolving hallucinogenic experiments.  She refuses to dissolve into 
LSD like Mucho (who encompasses so many individuals--he's a whole 
room of people) or into the Pacific like Driblette.  She remains 
apart, individual, separate, isolate.  She refuses to integrate, 
though she's drawn to the  auction at the end.  The question remains 
undecided, but she (a stand-in for Pynchon and for us) rejects 
McLuhan's easy out.  How clever of Pynchon to mention so many pop 
culture references of the mid-60s and not mention McLuhan.  Sorry to 
babble on.

Jeff