The Recognitions and V.

[Richard Ryan]

While I would agree there's nothing in V to suggest a belief in a
prelapsarian paradise (as village culture, hunter gatherer societies,
whatever) - it also appears that Pynchon - at least the early Pynchon
- sees the centripetal forces of entropy and mechanization
*accelerating*; the depersonalizing, disintegrating aspects of human
history grow more and more ferocious as the powers of techno-violence
trend upwards - or downwards, as the case may be.

On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 1:04 PM, Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hm. Do ya think? I haven't read The Recognitions yet, but V. seems to
> me to suggest that it has always been a fragmented world. Pynchon
> represents history as an Ariadne's thread through an ongoing
> Armageddon in which individuals seek ever more tenuous connections as
> complexity becomes more evident. The unifying element is memory
> itself, rather than recollection of a better unity.
>
> On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 9:40 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Fragmentation and loss as the overarching meaning of the modern world. Both.
>> Belief that the world was once unified and that that was/is felt as a basic Good
>> Thing.
>>
>> (Of course, other books, writers, too, I'm sure. Who?)
>>
>
>
>
> --
> "Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all
> creeds the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the
> trust in reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments
> of darkness groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates
> than the simplest urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
>
>



-- 
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
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