Railroads & steel and harsh technologies and nonfictional ideas (legal ramblings, really)

[Monte Davis]

Robin sez:

> [TRP] Knows he comes from one of the 
> great American 
> families, whose history comes up missing in Libraries and 
> Schools....


First and foremost: I love the connections you're turning up -- to the whole
oeuvre as well as AtD in particular -- and I thank you for all the work
you're putting into it. You're absolutely right that OBA's choices of
subject matter all along have had many specific connections to Pynchon
family history, not just way back when (the heresies of Conftant Slothrop
and of William "Meritorious Price of Our Redemption" Pynchon) but well into
the 20th century.

But (and you knew it was coming :-) I demur at the statement that that
family history "comes up missing in libraries and schools" -- or rather, at
the implication of a suppressed Secret History that's encoded in the books.

First, I can recall hearing from Joe Slade 30 years ago bits and pieces
about the Wall Street branch of the family that had turned up in research
for his 1975  _Thomas Pynchon_ , and I know we took for granted then that it
had fed into both the Pierce Inverarity backstory of CoL49 and GR's passages
about cartels, finance capital, Lyle Bland, etc. And while I can't claim
more than a very sketchy knowledge of the critical literature on Pynchon,
I've seen those connections crop up again and again in the little I have
read over the years.

Second, there've been a *lot* of "great American families" over the last 300
years whose names are no longer common currency as such. As a quick look at
any genealogical website reveals, many of the luminaries of colonial New
England have tens of thousands of living descendants. There were many
thousands of local banks in the 1850s issuing notes like that lovely Pynchon
Bank number on eBay. And I'll bet that a weekend's driving in the "Gatsby
belt" on the North Shore of Long Island would take me near not only Oyster
Bay, but hundreds if not thousands of families with ancestors who were
movers and shakers in the City before the Depression... and as such, could
be linked with railroads, power companies, Edison, Brown Brothers Harriman
(and every other investment bank and brokerage you care to name), etc., etc.
But I can't name them off the top of my head, despite having had a pretty
good education and reading pretty widely in history since then; does that
mean the Firm of Inverarity, Bland, Vibe and Illuminati has been at pains to
keep me (us) ignorant?

Bottom line: I don't think the Pynchon family history "comes up missing" at
all, not in any sense of concealment or suppression. I think it's been there
in plain sight all along for anyone who cared to look. Its relationship to
Pynchon's fiction is no more (and no less) encoded, laden with esoteric
significance, than the relationship of his own experience at Boeing -- and
as a Cold War teenager 12 years ahead of me -- to the role of missiles and
Yoyodyne and control electronics and "the balloon... about to go up" in his
books... or of his father's surveying work to Mason & Dixon, and the
recurring image of a man swinging his outstretched arms forward to strike an
approximate right angle. With a little effort, *every* family history -- and
every individual's -- ramifies and ravels out into our common history, and
vice versa.  

Please don't take this rambling too personally. I was primed for it by two
History Channel space programs in a row last night, one on the impact of
Sputnik and one on "Secret Soviet Space Disasters". Both of them referred,
casually and in passing, to the "fact" that the dark side of Wernher von
Braun's WWII role was "suppressed" during the space race and has only
emerged since the 1980s.

Well, you know where I come from on that: it's bullshit. The conditions at
Nordhausen were described in US newspaper stories in spring 1945; even the
first book-length accounts of the V2 in English, around 1950, made it clear
that WvB and many on his senior team had seen the tunnels during production
and could not possibly have been unaware that the workers were malnourished,
sick, housed like animals, and subject to savage discipline (whether that
was carried out before their eyes or not).

All this was part of the received story of WWII in British, French, Belgian,
some German (and no doubt Soviet) popular as well as scholarly history from
the 1950s on. If Americans didn't know it, it wasn't because the FBI, CIA,
DoD and NASA vigilantly burned all those books and articles at our borders.
It was because we were so busy producing and consuming *other* versions, the
ones that featured the urgent Cold War present and the shiny space future
rather than some boring old arcana about German munitions procurement. We
didn't want to hear about WvB as an SS officer, even pro forma. We were
happy to hear (and to the extent he talked about that time at all, he was
happy to tell us quite truthfully) that the Gestapo had hassled him based on
accusations that his team was spending too much time chatting about space,
not enough time heads-down thinking of ways to speed up A4 production. Mort
Sahl's wisecrack in 1960 and Tom Lehrer's song in 1965 weren't encoded
messages about suppressed history; they were pointing to what was in plain
sight. 

Bottom line #2, which is really the same bottom line:

 Last week I quoted Proverbs for Paranoids #3 ("If they can get you asking
the wrong questions, they don't have to worry about answers"). When it comes
to paranoia, OBA has acknowledged his debt to Orwell. I think #3 directs us
not to the Orwell of _1984_, in which all the history incongruent with the
official version has been erased. That's easy, in a way -- it's all about
Them.

It directs us -- more usefully, I think -- to the Orwell who wrote "To see
what is in front of one's nose needs a constant struggle." That's hard --
it's all about us.