COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board

[kelber at mindspring.com]

1. Pynchon's description of music (Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet Overture) heard on the radio:

"Captured in the score's black symbols, given life by vibrating air columns and strings,
having taken passage through transducers, coils, capacitors and tubes to a shuddering paper 
cone, the eternal drama of love and death continued to unfold entirely disconnected from this 
evening and place."

V (Perennial CLassics) p.95-96


2.  His description of the suburban sprawl of San Narciso:

"She looked down a slope, needing to squint for the sunlight, onto a vast sprawl of houses
which had grown up all together, like a well-tended crop, from the dull brown earth; and she
thought of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a battery and seen her first 
printed circuit.  The ordered swirl of houses and streets, from this high angle, sprang at her 
now with the same unexpected, astonishing clarity as the circuit card had.  Though she knew even 
less about radios than about Southern Californians, there were to both outward patterns a 
hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to communicate."

COL49 (Bantam) p. 13

3.  His description of Zoyd's trip over the Golden Gate Bridge:

"When the busful of northbound hippies first caught sight of it, just at sundown as the fog
was pouring in, the towers and cables ascending into pale gold otherworldly billows, you heard
a lot of 'Wow,' and 'Beautiful,' though Zoyd only found it beautiful the way a firearm is,
because of the bad dream unreleased in it, in this case the brute simplicity of height, the 
finality of what swept below relentlessly out to sea."

VL (Little Brown) p. 314-15

The first two show a fascination with technology.  Musical composition is merely an inanimate component in an electronic circuit.  A human community is deconstructed to its (electronic) form, while the electronic form is upgraded from an inanimate object to a mystical object.  Esther hears, Oedipa sees something human and finds it imbued with the inanimate.  Technology has taken over human communication, subsumed it.  By Vineland, Pynchon's not writing detailed descriptions of technology.  But his description of the Golden Gate is the opposite of the first two:  Zoyd sees something inanimate and imbues it with human meaning, pain and suicide.

In part, the "mature" Pynchon is more fascinated with people (specifically family) than technology.  But the change has affected all of us.  We (as in those of us on the p-list) are completely comfortable with technological communication as a stand-in for human communication.  It's easier to type and hit the send button to communicate with people I've never met, than it is to have a conversation with my next-door neighbors.  Pynchon is warning us in V, but especially in COL49, that it will come to this.  But he's not afraid, he's excited.  He loves the hidden meaning behind the circuit boards.  But the romance and mystery have long been lost, in the trip from vacuum tubes to diodes to printed circuits to chips.  Pynchon's looking for magic elsewhere now.  What makes COL49 so enticing is the sense that there's magic, malevolent and oppressive as it is, all around us.  Bad magic is more fun than good magic.

Laura