The Anonymous and TP

[Mark Kohut]

strange bedfellows happen.

Congress just voted down the Patriot Act, Tea Partyers split from Party saying

the Act was intrusive!

yes!


----- Original Message ----
From: Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Tue, February 8, 2011 11:01:48 AM
Subject: The Anonymous and TP

    Have you ever asked yourself what Pynchon reads or what news catches his 
eye? I'm interested in reading practices so I'm also interested in what people 
read, and that includes TP. Although I have no way to confirm or rule out my 
suspicions, there are things I see that I'm sure would interest him. That's the 
way I felt when I saw a BBC article 
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-12380987) about the group Anonymous 
attacking a private security firm.

    One aspect of this that I find particularly interesting is that Anonymous, 
whether or not you agree with them and what they do, uphold the right to be 
anonymous, to be unknown so to speak. (They apparently stand in contraposition 
to certain social networks as well as the decreasing anonymity and autonomy of 
internet users.)  This is interesting to me because it seems to be a position 
shared by Pynchon. If his avoidance of the public light and his Simpson 
appearance gag (only surpassed by having Professor Irwin Corey accept the 
National Book Award prize in TP's place) are not enough to support that, then we 

also have a quote from AD that may be read as warning on the 'Wharholization' of 

a person through the popular media. Shortly after boarding the Inconvenience, 
Lew finds out about the CC and we get the following: 


    "But you boys - you're not storeybook characters." He had a thought. "Are 
you?"
    "No more than Wyatt Earp or Nellie Bly." Randolph supposed. "Although the 
longer a fellow's name has been in the magazines, the harder it is to tell 
fiction from non-fiction." 

    But Pynchon is not the only one in the literary field with concerns about 
maintaining anonymity. About ten years ago a book called "Q" came out with the 
author's name given as Luther Blisset (some or many of you may be familiar with 
all this), it turned out, however, to be a pseudonym for a group. That group has 

since written other novels but now goes by the name Wu Ming, which means "no 
name". Although the identities of the group's members are known, they apparently 

avoid cameras or having their images disseminated. Sounds like someone,no?

     As these writers employ strategies of absence or invisibility in order to 
maintain their anonymity and autonomy, will others start to do the same? If 
someday there is a turn against the slow erosion of the concept of the sovereign 

individual's right to be anonymous (eroding down to a 1984 like world created by 

users and voters rather than imposed by some dreadful Big Brother), will someone 

perhaps look back to TP as one of the secular saints of anonymity, a forefather 
of a creed that says, 'We choose to remain unseen, to keep our inner world 
inside, we refuse to let what is private be subsumed by that which is public?

οὔτις