OK 2b Luddite?

[Joseph Tracy]

I thought we could start with some general responses to the essay and then move toward more specific passages and ideas.I think it is worth noting that Pynchon's essays, book reviews,  and other nonfiction writing is structurally pretty classic and accessable. Because of this it helps create  a few clear signposts of his sympathies and thought life, which are a little  ( among the subsribers to the list, a lot )harder to establish in his fiction which lends itself so easily to a variety of  focused interpretive rubrics. In a straightforward development of the question ".,what is a Luddite.anyway?" he  playfully  but clearly poses himself as a  modern luddite and thus a revolutionary antagonist to the "science" and politics of nuclear proliferation, death camps etc. What is harder to find is where this engineer/rocket scientist /writer couterpart to C.P. Snow might sympathize with positive aspects of industrialization, science and technology, perhaps he simply accepts the social and technological aspects of  such historic processes with satiric but good humored ambivalence.

  Still there are some remarkable consistencies in his writing and one is an attempt to set the historic record straight, or properly crooked. An accurate historical account which works hard to include and respect the "preterite"( I don't know why he chooses this term and am not that crazy about it*) , the marginal,  the outsiders and losers in historic conflicts is perhaps the most consistent aspect of what he does in both fiction and non-fiction.  Even his book review of Farina focuses on shaping an honest if deeply friendly look at the writer, and also reveals Pynchon's apprecaition and fondness for the culture and experiences of the outsiders of his generation. But  while in some ways critical of the dominance of sci-tec culture, the  essay can be read as conservative  if one were to take Snow's point of view, the writers TP admires are looking back fondly  to earlier times and beckoning literary badasses from their dream life, and from the darker possibilities of science itself  to trouble the godlike powers sought by  the scientific culture. Anyway it is this balancing of forces which leaves the reader more informed, imaginatively and logically stretched, wrung through the heart of the world, without easy answers, but deeply humored  that attracts me to Pynchon.

The dictionary defines the word to mean past but Pynchon seems to use it to mean lost or mrginalized the objects rather than the makers of history.  I would love to hear others insights on this odd use of the word.

Joseph Tracy
brook7 at earthlink.net
Why Wait? Move to EarthLink.
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