TPPM: Luddite fictions

[Paul Nightingale]

Briefly, two narrative aspects stand out in the Luddite essay: the use,
firstly, of digression marks this (and other texts from the mid-1980s)
as a kind of bridge between the earlier and latter novels. Then,
secondly, the discussion of power is framed in Foucaultian terms: recent
discussions of resistance and antirationalism are indeed pertinent.

1. The Luddite essay begins by citing Snow's "warning that intellectual
life in the West was becoming polarised into 'literary' and 'scientific'
factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other".
Subsequently, we find that Snow, unable to forget "offense taken in the
course of long-ago high-table chitchat", is perhaps a latter-day Rev.
William Lee, who invented the stocking-frame "out of pure meanness",
even if he did so "logically and coolly".

A good example of the way the essay is built on digression, then: the
fuss about "the two-culture formulation" (in particular the exchange
with Leavis) was a by-product of the lecture's reception, given that it
"was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in
the age of Sputnik".

In the period preceding the 1984 election, in the context of the Second
Cold War, the essay suggests that "the two-cultures quarrel can no
longer be sustained" before moving on to "the element of human
character" and "the subtext for Snow's immoderate, and thus celebrated,
assertion" etc. Similarly, the account of C18th Luddism is interrupted
by the reference to Lee's invention in the C16th. What one sees here is
the kind of narrative--stories appearing out of stories--that will
characterise VL and M&D and differentiate these novels from those
published earlier.

2. Implicit, even when not explicit, are questions about power that are
posed in Foucaultian terms: given that so much information is so readily
available to "[a]nybody with the time, literacy, and access fee", how
have we allowed, post-1945, "nuclear weapons [to] multiply out of
control"? One thinks of the SL Intro's reference to "the criminally
insane who have enjoyed power since 1945", while "the rest of us poor
sheep have always been stuck with simple, standard fear": technological
change might produce new problems, it also produces the means to
challenge the fate those problems have in store for us.

Consequently, the resistance identified principally with C18th Luddism,
"the deepest Luddite hope of miracle" is related to "the computer's
ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most
good", allowing us to "realise all the wistful pipe dreams of our days".
Pynchon as antirationalist here?

Referring to Eisenhower's speech about the military-industrial complex
(surely part of the context for "Togetherness"), the essay suggests
that, "because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less
possible to fool any of the people any of the time". Given the
discussion of computer technology elsewhere (eg the Stone Junction
Intro, the 1984 Foreword) we might pay a little attention to the way
Pynchon's writing deals with such problems at different times, rather
than assuming he has one set of ideas that are recycled time and again:
there is a degree of ambivalence (as with his comments, passim, on TV;
here, "the love/hate that grows up between humans and machinery") that
is central to resistance theory. There is, for example, no contradiction
whatsoever between the comment cited above ("because of the data
revolution" etc) and the Foreword's reference, twenty years on, to the
Internet "promis[ing] social control on a scale those quaint old
twentieth-century tyrants with their goofy moustaches could only dream
about".