COL49 - Chap 2: San Narciso as a circuit board

[Heikki Raudaskoski]

Fine post throughout. COL49's magic works for me too, and better than
that of VL and AtD. In these later novels, the magic also seems to be in
details, whereas the whole information-processing-gone-wild machinery of
COL49 is IMO more able to keep on producing magic. Oedipa's deeply human
concerns are channelled into the cybernetic structure of the novel - like
bad magic, an "inhuman" structure may also be more fun than a human one?
COL49 is like a computer that freezes in the decisive moment.

Of course, the novel prompts to look for excluded middles - that perhaps
point to human surpluses exceeding the system of ones and zeroes - but
*through* its digital structuring.


Heikki


On Sun, 10 May 2009 kelber at mindspring.com wrote:

> 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
>
>