IVIV (12): 195-197

[Monte Davis]

John Carvill sez:

> Interesting that some question the claim that Pynchon is 
> generally ambivalent about technology. Personally I struggle 
> to conceive of him being anything but ambivalent.

At least after he channeled Henry Adams' dynamophobia in _V._, he's been
quite clear that technology is *not* an autonomous force:

"All very well to talk about having a monster by the tail, but do you think
we'd've had the Rocket if someone, some specific somebody with a name and a
penis hadn't *wanted* to chuck a ton of Amatol 300 miles and blow up a block
full of civilians? Go ahead, capitalize the T on technology, deify it [or
reify it - MD] if it'll make you feel less responsible-but it puts you in
with the neutered, brother, in with the eunuchs keeping the harem of our
stolen Earth for the numb and joyless hardons of human sultans, human elite
with no right at all to be where they are-".

That theme carries through all the way to the dynamite, the morphing
liner/battleship, and the exhilaration of the proto-Fascist dive bombers in
_Against the Day_. Pynchon is ambivalent in that he knows very well how
technology (like language, or religion, or government) amplifies and
empowers our every instinct and impulse, for better or worse. 

But he doesn't ascribe agency to it. That seems lost on the many readers who
would enlist him in some late-late-Romantic crusade to Get Ourselves Back to
the Garden: "we're warm and human because we bailed out during Algebra 1,
and Technology is our chill external foe." The passage above is pretty
un-ambivalent about that stance: it's not just clueless, it actually makes
things easier for the *people* -- not  the trends, not the tendencies, not
the historical inevitabilities, not the technology, the *people* -- who are
fucking us over.

-Monte