Atatda22: [42.2i] Big-city melancholia, 609-611 #1

[Mark Kohut]

Simply great stuff.
Reasons: We know TRP has read Weber, probably Durheim and some other biggest-picture
thinkers about society, "modern' society, and everything related. 

I was a young bookseller in a very good bookstore and these "classic" social thinkers
were in print (and in distribution), were being reissued, reviewed, written about,
etc., during TRPs young manhood. (Although we know that TRP may have gotten to
them in his own way, with original connections and right to the originals. So. I am just sharing
a book/cultural memory for the young ones on the -p-list basically)

ReSimmel: Pynchon's words/incredible scenes re "money", for example, esp. in GR (and in ATD as we
are discovering). 

Later,
MK








----- Original Message ----
From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2007 11:59:59 PM
Subject: Atatda22: [42.2i] Big-city melancholia, 609-611 #1

[609.37-610.1] "The suburbs out this way tended to be corrupted versions of
the Mother City. Wenlets containing the worst of village eccentricity and
big-city melancholia."

Or: repetition and difference.

Turn-of-the-century social theory dwelt on the transformation of community.
What AtD, above, calls "big-city melancholia" echoes the work of Ferdinand
Tonnies (the 'loss of community' thesis) and Emile Durkheim (the development
of organic solidarity and the related problem of anomie). The following
extract, from Simmel's The Philosophy of Money (first published 1907),
considers anomic social relations in connection to the role played by money.

The lonely settler in the German or American forests is non-dependent; the
inhabitants of a modern metropolis are independent in the positive sense of
the word, and even though they require innumerable suppliers, workers and
cooperators and would be lost without them, their relationship to them is
completely objective and is only embodied in money. Thus the city dweller is
not dependent upon any of them as particular individuals but only upon their
objective services which have a money value and may therefore be carried out
by any interchangeable person. In that the purely money relationship ties
the individual very closely to the group as an abstract whole and in that
this is because money ... is the representative of abstract group forces,
the relationship of individual persons to others simply duplicates the
relationship that they have to objects as a result of money.

From: Georg Simmel, The Philosophy of Money, ed David Frisby, Routledge,
2004, 300-301.


Cf. Lew's experience at the Esthonia Hotel (39-40), up to Hershel's
"[r]everse tip" (40). Also the "double agent" speech on 242.

As a detective Lew is perpetually outside, out-of-synch even. His outsider
status might be compared to that enjoyed (?) by Kit. Lew recalls Oedipa; Kit
recalls Slothrop.

Key question, then, in anticipation of Ch43: how does Lew negotiate his way
through this chapter?


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