airships and mellow technologies and fictional ideas (silly ramblings, really)

[David Morris]

On Nov 7, 2007 8:40 PM, Michael Bailey <bonhommie-man at live.com> wrote:
>
> If (which I'm not totally sure in the kishkas, but there is textual evidence) if Pynchon is anti-railway, it's certainly not without justification: noisy, polluting, laying steel tracks across ley lines, scaring wildlife...
>

Saying that Pynchon is "anti-railway" makes me cringe a little.
This is way too simplistic an equation.  Pynchon's novels examine
power relationships, and these relationships are constantly shifting.
As a part of his examinations of power structures he idealizes the
untamed/unregulated "wilderness," and sees how it is bridled, carved
up, and enslaved.  Railways are only a component of this dynamic.  Not
inherently "bad" (Really, do you think he likes cars better? Maybe
horses?),  but a potential force used to control and take possession
of what was formerly free.  See this quote from GR (courtesy of
Quail's "Modern Word") to see what he's really getting at.  Remember,
Pynchon loves abstractions, and taking anything literally is usually a
disservice to the intended depths of consideration:

"In the days of the gauchos, my country was a blank piece of paper.
The pampas stretched as far as men could imagine, inexhaustible,
fenceless. Wherever the gaucho could ride, that place belonged to him.
But Buenos Aires sought hegemony over the provinces. All those
neuroses about property gathered strength, and began to infect the
countryside. Fences went up, and the gaucho became less free. It is
our national tragedy. We are obsessed by labyrinths, where before
there was the open plain and sky. To draw ever more complex patterns
on the blank sheet. We cannot abide the openness: it is terror to us.
Look at Borges. Look at the suburbs of Buenos Aires. The tyrant Rosas
has been dead a century, but his cult flourishes. Beneath the city
streets, the warrens of rooms and corridors, the fences and the
networks of steel track, the Argentine heart, in its perversity and
guilt, longs for a return to that first unscribbled serenity . . .
that anarchic oneness of pampas and sky. . . . "
--Gravity's Rainbow V264/B307


David Morris