Reading the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow ...

[alice wellintown]

A Liberal Education in the Humanities, even long before Marcuse, or
even if one were coming of age in a University when he was fab but not
paying attention to him or the others he cites in the First
Introduction, would have addressed these concerns. Leo Marx's The
Machine in the Garden traces Marcuse back to Carlyle who is read by
Emerson before he pens Nature and Melville before he wrote  Moby-Dick.
 We should do well to remember that, while Moby-Dick had no influence
during the high water mark in American Letters, Nature was more
popular than the Bible. That's popular. It was read, recited, quoted,
used everywhere by everyone. Other texts that carry the same
pre-Alienation, pre-Late Capitalism, pre-Information Sociey warning of
the devaluation of the Humanities and the Human World and the increase
in direct relation in the value of the world of things, as
Carlye/Marx, akin to the citation list Marcuse provides were popular
too.

The argument that AtD is saturated with math and science and therefore
also has a complex post-Einsteinian structure doesn't hold up. Math
and Science are satirized in the texts. The intellectual work of the
Organization Man is treated with ironic and satiric tones. The model,
again, is Moby-Dick. The librarian, the linguist, the logos, the quest
for a system or structure is satirized. The High Priest of Lightning,
Tesla, is a gnostic-zealot. As is Webb. Pynchon criss-crosses the
names in the novel. Vibe to Traverse. They are Them.

Let me go read that part on Delillo's Names ...