Science in M&D

[Daniel Harper]

I was planning on doing a fairly involved post about science and technology in 
M&D (and, by extension, to Pynchon's other works) but I'm feeling a bit 
fuzzy-headed this morning and am having difficulty putting my thoughts into 
words. Let me instead throw a quote from the book out there and try to start 
a bit of conversation, if no one minds.

"Mr. Swivett, approaching a facial lividity that would alarm a Physician, were 
one present, now proclaims, "Not only did they insult the God-given structure 
of the Year, they also put us on Catholic Time, _French_ Time. We've been 
fighting France all our Lives, all our Father's Lives, France is the Enemy 
eternal, -- why be rul'd by their Calendar?"

"Because their Philosophers and ours," explains Mr. Hailstone, "are all in 
League, with those in other States of Europe, and the Jesuits too, among them 
possessing Machines, Powders, Rays, Elixirs and such, none less than 
remarkable, -- one, now and then, so daunting that even the Agents of Kings 
must stay their Hands." (M&D, p 192 of hardback)

I think this is highly important. It points towards a lot of the problems that 
people have with science, that it ignores or refutes many of the things that 
people believe (hatred of the French, racism, sexism, religious beliefs, et 
cetera) and expresses in a condensed form some of the things that seem to be 
present in Pynchon's other works: that science and technology have robbed us 
of our humanity, that they are somehow nonconcerned with human feelings and 
needs, et cetera.

I think, though, that the case can be made that while our day-to-day lives may 
be impacted in negative ways by the pursuit of technology, that the _proper_ 
place of science is aloof from these concerns, dealing more with the factual 
truths of our existence than with whether these ideas are <gasp> _French_. 
This passage points toward the truth, that science is an international effort 
ignoring old feuds and boundaries, and that the power of the scientific 
method would eventually become more powerful than any monarch could ever 
dream to become. 

In a sense, Swivett above is so concerned with the minutinae of those eleven 
days that he's "losing" (but not really) that he cannot see the beauty of the 
accomplishment that requires this calendar change -- the accurate plotting of 
the Earth's orbit around the sun through careful measurement and mathematics, 
and the resulting correction of an error-prone Julian calendar. Swivett is 
using a calendar that is _wrong_, and it is the goal of Science to correct 
it, but Swivett can only see the tradition of the day, and his own 
nationalistic hubris gets in the way of understanding.

Science is measuring things that are way out of scale of our human concerns, 
whether it be the movement of planets in M&D or the nature of space and time 
itself in ATD, what you and I may _want_ to be true has little to do with the 
observations that scientists are able to make, and the theories that develop 
from them. _Of course_ science moves at a more-than-human scale -- it is 
dealing with issues that are much more important than our petty rivalries 
here on Earth.

This, and the simple poetry that seems to come whenever M&D are viewing the 
heavens, seems to imply that Pynchon is far from anti-science -- if anything, 
he is wildly in favor of it. Instead, Pynchon is expressing through these 
characters the difficulty in wrapping our puny minds around the grandiose 
scale of scientific enterprise, and the frightening dehumanizing nature of 
what is discovered. The universe, we now know, really is billions of 
light-years wide, and the Earth itself has been around for millions of times 
our own puny scale of reference. If science is dehumanizing, it is because 
the universe itself is dehumanizing, and much of Pynchon's fiction seems to 
point towards our own inadequacy of dealing with that.

Whew, I guess I wasn't quite as fuzzy-headed as I thought. I meant to quote a 
bit more, and bring in more sources, but I think the above gets at some of 
the main points I wanted to cover. I welcome comments and criticism, for I 
know that this is by far the only way of viewing the passages I mention 
above.
-- 
No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.
--Daniel Harper
countermonkey.blogspot.com