Pynchon & Math (Aristotle vs. Plato)

[Joseph Tracy]

The Lacey article is excellent. Thanks for that reference. I do think he overstates the black hole interpretation of Pynchon's worldview- the idea that a point has been passed beyond which light may never again bring hope of a more peaceful and potentially meaningful and sustainable life for the talking monkeys. In Pynchon's nonfiction and book reviews we hear a man who offers  friendly criticism and corrective ideas to dangerous intellectual, social  and political directions; that must mean something. Lacey also backs away from this argument as he considers Slothrop's rainbow disintegration.

But Lacey makes an excellent case in a very rich attempt to understand P's political and philosphical vision. I would love to see a group discussion of this article if others are interested.?

On Jan 26, 2013, at 10:06 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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.
> 
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 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