ATDTDA (1): naphtha engines

[Dave Monroe]

--- Tim Strzechowski <dedalus204 at comcast.net> wrote:

> "[...] ships powered by guncotton reciprocators and
> naphtha engines [...]" (p. 27).

For Pynchon, World War II was a monstrous holocaust, a
cataclysm of 40 million souls, resulting from a
competition among technologies. The old dynasty, the
J. P. Morgan dynasty, was built on the technologies of
coal, steel, and railroads; the newer Rockefeller
dynasty on the technologies of oil (petrochemicals,
plastics), aluminum, and aircraft. Pynchon says that
World War II was a corporate war reflecting those
technologies, that for many their “first loyalty,
legal and moral, is to the estate [corporation] she
represents. Not to our boys in uniform [the
nation-state], however gallant, whenever they died”
(Lot 49, 53).

In Gravity’s Rainbow, Pynchon has to bring up the long
ago relationship between Standard Oil and the I.G.
Farbenindustrie. Standard Oil and I.G. Farben did
arrange to share world markets in 1936, and as an act
of good faith, they exchanged some 2,000 patents just
prior to World War II. Their multinational character
forced them to make arrangements for the contingencies
of war. 

[...]

By referring to this multinational liaison as “the
century’s master cabal,” Pynchon is suggesting more
than corporate cooperation. He is suggesting that
World War II was part of the “Plot Which Has No Name,”
the concerted effort by the new dynasty to bring down
the old dynasty. This is hinted at again and again in
the book....

[...]

... 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superseded the Bronze Age superseded the Stone Age.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

   Pynchon will hint throughout Gravity’s Rainbow at
the Nazis’ relation to IG Farben and IG Farben’s to
Standard Oil, hence the Rockefellers. In 1929, IG
Farben sold the international rights to its
hydrogenation process to Standard Oil for two percent
of the Company. This made IG Farben the largest single
stockholder in Standard Oil after the Rockefeller
family. As early as 1932, Hitler understood the war
potential of the hydrogenation of coal into oil and
promised preferential treatment for IG Farben,
Germany’s largest Corporation. The IG supported Hitler
in the election of 1933 to the tune of 400,000 marks
(Joseph Borkin,  The Crime and Punishment of I.G.
Farben  [1978]). Just as Pynchon must have known the
story of the fall of Fox Films, and how his family’s
brokerage house, Pynchon & Co., fell as well, he
obviously knew of Standard Oil’s connection to IG
Farben, and how the IG helped bankroll the Nazis, who
in turn helped the Falange in Spain and the Iron Guard
in Rumania. He identifies with Rojas, Unamuno, Richard
Lovelace, Klee, Bartók, King Carol, Magda Lupescu, and
Howard Fast; that is why they people his work. And it
has all been there, in the text, from the very
beginning....

http://www.vheissu.info/art/art_eng_SL_hollander.htm#chap_10

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

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


 
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