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

[Mark Kohut]

That giant "eyeball of society" phrase and image early in AtD, as they watch the photographer chase the scantily-clad woman--instead of doing it
with her naturally in the nature they are running in----is AN EXACT QUOTE
from Emerson's "Nature."

And, in "the Machine in the Garden:, Leo Marx quotes from Thoreau on his beloved nature ..pierced by the awful train whistle....
A--and we know what TRP thinks of trains in AtD......

--- On Sat, 8/8/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Reading the Value System of Gravity's Rainbow ...
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Saturday, August 8, 2009, 8:07 PM
> 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 ...
>