IVIV (12): 195-197

[Mark Kohut]

Monte writes:
"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."

And more good words about how it is we human beings who have done what's been done. 

Still, I say, yes, he knows this, but the vision of his fiction has a small part of the "for better"--re technology---and a massive dose of "for worse".....up thru Agaionst the Day where he so perfectly, so anti-literally has a mysterious future catastrophe so bad the Trespassers have come to try to tell us but we can't seem to hear. 

History---the history that people make with their tools and actions---is a Step-function, TRP wrote early......we the people build a much more complex world with our tools-----and they, as WW2 and nukes are always saying---which may yet destroy us and has destroyed millions.

I, if it matters, do not think TRP wants to take us back to any romantic 
Garden and I think he is one of our best writers BECAUSE he makes us have to understand a lot about the complex science-tech foundational world we live in............in order to feel what we have lost, how we might 'survive' it, in it....'put your hand between your legs, etc."

And, yes, that he never rested with flinging around an easy-answer System to explain the Modern World is why Against the Day tries to go even deeper and deeper than GR in its insights into the world we have created.

With the BAD I forgot to list electricity.....V. born in the same year as electric street-lights, arc lights (vs. vs the natural lighting of the sun) are a constant negative trope in AtD...and have traces back to V...
a petty pervasive aspect of the developed world and, of course, TRP has lights and he walks on the streets of NY and other cities under street lights....

all means little but that he has experienced viscerally his major themes...

He has lived in the America--and the World--as it has unfurled. He has felt it to critique it----and one of the deepest perpectives is of the 'simply human' that we, the modern world, has/have lost.......as the bottom of that vision---against which/because of which, he SEES!

I believe, evidently a minority viewpoint, so be it, that ONE of the ambiguously resonant, poetically visionary, not literal(!) meanings of Aganst the Day is Day  =  the Enlightenment, the birth of the 'modern world',---- some sez. 









--- On Sun, 11/1/09, Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> From: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>
> Subject: RE: IVIV (12): 195-197
> To: "'John Carvill'" <johncarvill at gmail.com>, pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, November 1, 2009, 6:38 AM
> 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 
> 
>