Henry's secular peturbations (Tony Tanner)

[David Morris]

Eddie,

I just now read this post, and it's a great one.  I've never read Tanner, but
he's clearly got a real strong handle on some of the more important themes that
permeate GR and V.  Thanks for taking the  time to type and send this.

David Morris

--- Eddie Bettano <eddiebettano at yahoo.com> wrote:
> From Patterns and Paranoia or Caries and Cabals
> By Tony Tanner
> Thomas Pynchon made his intentions clear from the outset. The title of his
first important short story is 'Entropy' ... and it contains specific
references to Henry Adams. Whereas some novelists would prefer to cover the
philosophic tracks which gave them decisive shaping hints for their novels,
Pynchon puts those tracks  on the surface of his writing. Indeed his work is
about those tracks and, more largely, the whole human instinct and need to make
tracks. Adams wanted a theory which would act as a `trail' in `the thickset
forests of history' and even if we change that metaphor of the forest for that
of the urban wasteland, thick with the rubble and dead of our century of total
wars, the need for a trail or a track may still remain. A philosophy, a theory
of history, a law of thermodynamics any one of these may be a `trail' and their
significance may reside not so much in their verifiable applicability as in the
human compulsion to formulate them. Pynchon sees all this quite clearly, and
while his work is certainly about a world succumbing to entropy, it is also
about the subtler human phenomenonthe need to see patterns which may easily
turn into the tendency to suspect plots. (p. 78) 
> Norbert Wiener said in The Human Use of Human Beings that it is always likely
to be a problem whether we interpret whatever it is that makes for
disorganization in nature as merely a neutral absence of order (the Augustinian
view, he called this), or as a positively malign force dedicated to the
annihilation of order. He added The Augustinian position has always been
difficult to maintain. It tends under the slightest perturbation to break down
into a covert Manichaeanism.

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