IVIV Pynchon & McLuhan

[Doug Millison]

Robin observes "the dreamscape of Loony Tunes characters"

To me, IV seems to work very much like a cartoon, in its visuals and  
dialogue, and the way the story moves,  where Pynchon's descriptions  
stand in for a cartoon's visuals while action and dialogue work like a  
comic book  or, because of the length of the book, a graphic novel.


> From: Michael Bailey
> Cervantes was always on about the "damnable romances", and how they
> ruined poor DQ's life; they were the equivalent television
> of their time, in a way, or so goes my hypothesis.


  McLuhan makes a similar point, in The Gutenberg Galaxy. See page 13  
in the version at books.google.com:

<http://books.google.com/books?id=y4C644zHCWgC&printsec=frontcover&dq=McLuhan&ei=6nCqSr3VD5K0MKmcvKoK#v=onepage&q=Cervantes&f=false 
 >

I suspect that close reading may support the notion that in IV  
reflects McLuhan's ideas about the way film grew out of print which  
is, fundamentally, at the level of our nervous systems, all about  
Analysis and Control, and how TV, with the new "sense ratio" that it  
brings and its de-emphasizing of the visual and re-integrating the  
sense of touch back to something like it might have been in the  
"manuscript age" before the printing press. Film was the end of the  
print technology line, McLuhan argues, while TV, with its RGB dots  
that our eyes and brains have to connect so we can process and  
understand the information the TV is giving us.  The Internet is the  
logical extension of the global nervous system that TV ushered in.


>  David Morris:
> DQ was corrupted by Romances (thanks, MB), and Doc thinks Sherlock
> Holmes was a real person, one who's drug addiction justifies Doc's
> indulgences.  Everyone in VL andIV uses popular TV shows as a medium
> of communication.  And film in GR is called "pornography."  Fiction in
> all its forms is a corrupting distraction from real first-hand
> experience, like a drug.


Film as a sort of "pornography" is in McLuhan, too.   I can't  
recommend McLuhan enough, especially The Gutenberg Galaxy, for Pynchon  
readers.