IVIV (12): 195-197

[Mark Kohut]

Good. Glad you too see TRP as not balanced in his view of technology. 

Nuanced as anyone, more than most, he is, imho, but the sublety is (mostly) in all the ways we are dehumanized, I repeat boringly, unsubtley.

And---Mason & Dixon, perhaps his most optimistic work(?), is set 200 years ago in America's brave new world and set a century before his widest focus on immachination, as you nicely term it, begins. 

Wm. Blake's screeds on industrialism are almost as subtle as ad copy, to be hyperbolic; D.H. Lawrence has a deep vision of the only human, but makes
little attempt at a fully historical vision of how and why. Many, many other 20th Century writers share profound antipathies to 'modernity' but most of them write their own versions of Gardens with maybe no one else sourcing our 'scientific materialism' so widely and deeply.



--- On Tue, 11/3/09, Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com> wrote:

> From: Tore Rye Andersen <torerye at hotmail.com>
> Subject: RE: IVIV (12): 195-197
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, November 3, 2009, 8:14 AM
> 
> Mark:
>  
> > When machines are not so bad, as in these examples,
> workers 
> > lose even their dehumanizong work.
>  
> Yes they do, and that is why Mason rightly rages against
> the mills.
> But something good also occasionally comes of the
> introduction of 
> those mills, and Pynchon presents both sides. I wouldn't
> necessarily
> say that he presents a "balanced" view - I agree that
> technology on
> the whole tends to be presented in a bad light - but he
> does show
> us that the issue isn't completely one-sided.
>  
> Think also of the whole Longitude-issue in M&D, the war
> between
> Lunars and advocates of Harrison's clock. In the end, of
> course,
> Harrison wins out, and Maskelyne, while personally invested
> in
> the Lunar-school, recognizes the advantages of technology
> in this
> matter as well: 
>  
> "the method of Lunars being by no means universally lov'd,
> its
> tediousness indeed often resented, and not only by
> Midshipmen 
> trying to learn it,-- many wish'd for a faster way, willing
> to
> cede to Machinery a form of Human Effort they could've
> done
> without." (731)    
>         
>           
>   
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