Pynchon's prophecies

[Tore Rye Andersen]

Riffing on Laura's excellent comments:
 
> the unseen narrator in the book seems firmly rooted in 1969. 
> Still, the sensibilities seem somewhat inauthentic, anachronistic 
> for the times.  The ARPAnet would be a weird (and cool) aside if 
> we were reading about it in 1970.  Its significance for us in the 
> present day is drastically different.
 
All of Pynchon's novels are filled with prophecies, but I'd say that 
one of the differences between early Pynchon and late Pynchon is that 
early Pynchon seemed genuinely prophetic, whereas late Pynchon makes 
his prophecies with the advantage of hindsight. All the stuff about 
information and computers in Lot 49 and GR seems genuinely 
prophetic to me:
 
"Someday it'll all be done by machine. Information machines. You are 
the wave of the future." (GR, 258) 
 
Also Der Springer's comments on pocket-size movie cameras (527), or
the narrator's own prophecies of guilt tourism in the extermination
camps ring prophetic to me. In novels like AtD and IV, hip characters
still make their prophecies and still speak of "the wave of the future,"
but the future they're speaking of is really past. Thus, when a character
in AtD (I forget who) prophesies that real estate prices in Colorado
will soar into millions of dollars, when Aunt Reet in IV prophesies
that in the future, we will check out real estate on our computers,
or when Fritz makes prophecies about the future Internet, Pynchon
is no longer making prophecies about our future. He's making prophecies
about our past.
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