Pynchon & Math (Aristotle vs. Plato)
alice wellintown
alicewellintown at gmail.com
Sat Jan 26 09:06:12 CST 2013
I would argue this sort of naturalism, nature as a series of
convenient but contingent truths, is a staple of american fiction more
generally. For example, look at how Pynchon handles the feud between
the Quaternionists and the Vectorists in AtD.
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American Fiction Generally.
“The pragmatic method is primarily a method of settling metaphysical
disputes that otherwise might
be interminable. Is the world one or many? – fated or free? – material
or spiritual? – here are
notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and
disputes over such notions are
unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret
each notion by tracing its
respective practical consequences. What difference would it
practically make to any one if this
notion rather than that notion were true? If no practical difference
whatever can be traced, then the
alternatives mean practically the same thing, and all dispute is idle.
Whenever a dispute is serious,
we ought to be able to show some practical difference that must follow
from one side or the other’s
being right” (James).
Thinking, ideas, produce practical consequences, and the value of
these toughts, these ideas, is, here I'll dither with the word
"convenient" but Not the word, "contingent" because it is not a matter
of what is convenient, but what the value of the idea is when used,
what the consequences are, in Thought, Action, and Passion (McKeon).
What difference does it make if this or that is true? Well, none if
there are no consequences of this or that idea. For ideas derive their
significance from our use of them.
As mentioned, Pynchon and American Pragmatism has been much discussed
in the critical literature, sometimes in a note, as in the example in
the essay on Percy & Pragmatism linked at the bottom of this post,
where I provide an excerpt, the note that includes a ref. to Benny and
V., and the link for the full text.
Others include:
"Thomas Pynchon on Totalitarianism: Power, Paranoia, and Preterition
in Gravity’s Rainbow" by Robert J. Lacey
http://americanaejournal.hu/vol6no2/lacey
Jeffrey S. Baker on the Radical Critique of American Imperialism in
the 1960s (in Thomas Pynchon, H. Bloom, ISBN 0794170301)
Baker, Jeffrey S. “Amerikkka Uber Alles: German Nationalism, American
Imperialism, and the 1960s Antiwar Movement in Gravity's Rainbow.”
Critique 40, no. 4 (summer 1999): 323-41.
The American Evasion of Pragmatism: Souls, Science, and The Case of
Walker Percy
By Rob Chodat, Boston University
Pragmatism, too, has often seen itself is such world-historical terms,
yet it has never been readily capable of, or interested in, the
fevered all-or-nothing visions that such authors express. The “soul of
Western man,” for Rorty and Dennett as much as for James and Dewey,
has occasionally experienced vertigo in its transition to modernity,
but to say it is “in the very act of flying apart” is both to simplify
a complex set of historical developments and to ignore the very real
compensations that for them these developments entail. None of which
means, of course, that pragmatists could never respect or even
treasure the work of Percy and his literary descendents. They
certainly could.54 But to do so would require that they treat these
texts more as cautionary tales or thought experiments than as viable
predictions about what could or should come to pass. Pragmatists, that
is, will be inclined to follow Kenneth Burke’s lead and treat these
texts as extended proverbs: vivid, protracted warnings about what to
avoid when describing the mind, what dark fly-bottles we can enter
when we’re not careful in our accounts of cognition and intention. The
texts will seem to be primarily what Burke referred to as proverbs of
“admonition,”55 and pragmatists could appreciate them much in the way
that devout Christians might appreciate the thoroughly fallen worlds
of Poe or Cormac McCarthy. But like such a Christian, pragmatists will
have trouble accommodating any claim that these texts depict the most
important truths about us, or what things are really like, or what we
essentially are or have become. An author, they will say, isn’t
mistaken for writing a book like Love in the Ruins, only for believing
too strictly in what it says: seeing it as more than an occasional
satire, the expression of a mood, something to cast aside when it no
longer serves. To read in this way, to see Percy’s dystopian visions
as mere conceits or his picture of mind as misleading and fanciful,
will seem to some readers to ignore or diminish the claim that his and
similar texts make upon us. Pragmatism will seem to be merely
shrugging off our most urgent questions—are we fundamentally material
creatures or are we something more?—with a casual “It all depends.”
And it will seem, in turn, curiously unresponsive to the drama of
intensity and obsessiveness that so much modern art articulates,
substituting potent ideals of spiritual perfection and salvation for
weaker, meliorist ideals of intellectual growth and social progress.56
How we understand the pragmatist revival of the last few decades, and
whether we want it to shape the fiction of the future, depends on
which of these ideals we ourselves prefer, or which we find
convincing, which we think we need to believe in order to live, and
how prepared we are to choose one.57
note 57:
One could cite earlier texts that ontologize the mind in similar
ways, even before the pragmatist revival of the early 1970s. Early
Pynchon, say: midway through V. (1963), Benny Profane, struggling with
the increasingly “inanimate” world of cold technology and warfare,
timidly offers up the term “soul”—but is summarily dismissed by the
automaton SHROUD, who scoffs, “What are you doing, getting religion?”
Such an early case, however, only helps illustrate part of my point,
which is that little seems to change in American fiction after
pragmatism returns to the intellectual scene.
http://nonsite.org/issues/issue-3/the-american-evasion-of-pragmatism-souls-science-and-the-case-of-walker-percy#foot_src_52
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