Marshall McLuhan & Pynchon

[jbor]

The Nefastis Machine parody of Maxwell's Demon is another tie-in here I
suspect. And I think we can factor in Norbert Wiener as well as Adams and
McLuhan, although the former two are probably more relevant for _V._ (as you
indicate) than for _Lot49_, where the McLuhanesque vision does seem to be
prominent in both the imagery and themes.

I agree that things are left up in the air at the end, but I think there is
a degree of ambivalence about Oedipa and her entrenched biases and solipsism
as well. She's pretty harsh with Mucho, for example, and I've never been
persuaded to follow her lead and go out hunting Volkswagens on the freeway.

An excellent post. Thanks.

best


on 30/6/02 8:03 AM, Jeff Meikle at meikle at mail.utexas.edu wrote:

> 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