TPPM (9): Pynchon's Grid Motif

[Tim Strzechowski]

"Philadelphia, by Franklin's time, answered less and less to the religious vision that William Penn had started off with. The city was becoming a kind of high-output machine, materials and labor going in, goods and services coming out, traffic inside flowing briskly about a grid of regular city blocks. The urban mazework of London, leading into ambiguities and indeed evils, was here all rectified, orthogonal." [...]

cf. Stone Junction intro:

[...] "At last Daniel is ready to set off on the metaphysical Quest all these teachers have been preparing him for, which now swiftly unfolds as an elaborate technocaper, with a mysterious and otherworldly six-pound Diamond as its target. Too early in those days for keyboard dramas, emergency downloads, and cyber-fugues to relentless countdowns at the corner of the screen, the technology Daniel goes up against is mostly of analog sort -- optical surveillance, strain-gauge sensor grids and thermostatic alarms -- his nondigital responses to which include nerve gas, plastique, and invisibility."
http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_essays_stone.html

Also:

[...] "Thus begins the reconfiguration of myth, through the "filling in" of the earth with matter, to the architectonics of information, which again become "light" in the form of electrical grids of L.E.D. and fiber-optics, and (as Hinds and others point out) the internet." [...]
http://www.reconstruction.ws/021/Haunting.htm

And:
And so we get the aforementioned STORY OF BYRON THE BULB, who gets into trouble with the international light-bulb cartel by not burning out when he's supposed to. The other light bulbs notice his unusual longevity, and compare it to other cases they've heard of on what Pynchon calls, with a capital G, the Grid. 

Other light bulbs can recognize his immortality on sight, but it's never discussed except in a general way, when folklore comes flickering in from other parts of the Grid, tales of the Immortals, one in a kabbalist's study in Lyons who's supposed to know magic, another in Norway outside a warehouse facing arctic whiteness with a stoicism more southerly bulbs begin strobing faintly just at the thought of. (650)


So "the Grid" is a kind of webspace, the global circuitry not of T-1 lines and telephone links but the primordial power grid itself, adopted for the sake of this fantasy to the needs of instant communication. In the style of a recent New Yorker cartoon, you might say that on the Internet of this prophecy, nobody knows you're a light bulb.
http://www.pynchon.pomona.edu/gr/bsto.html 


Also, doesn't Stephen Weisenburger, the author of A Gravity's Rainbow Companion, mention the early drafts of GR being written on grids (i.e., drafting paper)?  And I seem to recall a passage out of CoL49 in which the California landscape of homes is described in similar fashion (as a circuit card).  (cf. p. 24 of the First Perrenial Fiction Library Ed., 1990)


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