ATDDTA (6) 177(railroads)

[Dave Monroe]

--- Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> Joseph T (on the positive image of railroads in Lot
> 49):
> 
> >In lot 49  perhaps the railroads may be seen to
> >parallel the  alternate postal system. Once
> >competitive with other forms of transport as Thurn 
> >and Taxis were with state mail, the rails have 
> >become secondary to Interstates and Air transport
> >and become a kind  of preterite system as Big 
> >Oil has become the colonizing and imperial global
> >force.
> 
> This is very good! The railroads - shiny new
> manifestations of capitalism and colonialization
> in AtD - have by the 1960'es become a battered old 
> method of transport for hoboes. The rails have, in
> a sense, become a preterite technology, and the
> emphasis in both GR and Lot 49 is on those bums
> and Displaced Persons that are transported by
> this means ...

Doubleplusgood.  Cf. ...

The Tristero underground has so far been implied to be
a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian drop-outs, an
archipelago of "isolates" having "withdrawn" from the
Republic, a lunatic fringe in tatters.  But suddenly,
in this last rhetorical leap, the Tristero broadens
its scope to include, in a grand, almost liturgical
gesture, all the outcasts of American history....

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0311&msg=87452

To know Pynchon is to know his family’s history, his
passion for history and historical method, and to see
how political consciousness of a historical kind
becomes central to Pynchon’s aesthetic, becomes one of
Pynchon’s penchants. Pynchon’s writing evokes the
dispossessed heirs of the old American dynasty based
on steel, coal, and railroads. He writes much as
Faulkner wrote for the dispossessed heirs of the
agrarian South. But, as Faulkner attributed evil to
the carpetbagging agents of the industrial North (J.
P. Morgan as villain), Pynchon attributes evil to the
agents of the new multinational, petrochemical dynasty
(J. P. Morgan as victim).

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_2

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/ppolitics.htm

Some serious thinkers, men not apparently on anyone’s
payroll, maintain that oil technology had to supersede
coal technology much as the Iron Age superseded the
Bronze Age superseded the Stone Age. Other equally
reasonable men say no; coal technology was impeded by
lack of government subsidy at critical points in its
development. Ironically, I. G. Farben in 1926 devised
a method for extracting fuel oil from coal, a process
just now judged economical enough to use in this
country and called shale-oil. Critics say that coal
could have kept pace with oil; a fossil fuel is a
fossil fuel, a hydrocarbon is a hydrocarbon, they say.

If this is in fact true, then the development of the
various technologies were political decisions, not the
ineffable hand of history, not the inexorable march of
Capital Tee Technology. And that makes Pynchon,
relative to Pynchon & Co., ally of J.P. Morgan, an
embittered though fantastically gifted loser.

Throughout Gravity’s Rainbow Pynchon’s various
spokesmen argue Entropy vs Return. Like Teilhard De
Chardin, the noted Jesuit scholar, there are those who
articulate the inevitability of energy dissipation,
that all systems go from states of high energy, to
less, to none, following the second law of
thermodynamics. Others argue that there is always some
chance of renewal, that there is still some dialectic
operating in History, Fortune’s Wheel.

Pynchon, by having Slothrop as Rocketfellow
disintegrate, implies the oil dynasty will go the
parabolic way of all history’s dynasties, and by
arguing for Return suggests that maybe the coal and
steel boys, the Morgans and the Rothschilds, might be
there at the end to pick up the pieces. In the
meantime, “Their entire emphasis is now toward
silence, impersonation, opposition masquerading as
allegiance.”

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/inferno.htm


       
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