Well, Pynchon seems to have

[Monte Davis]

He writes better than anyone else about the intersections of science and
technology with our lowest *and* highest inclinations. If you missed the
inspiration and glimpses of transcendence that astronomy and geo-metry hold
for Chas & Jeremiah, or photochemistry for Merle - or even aerodynamics for
Pokler before the Reich took over rocketry - you really should read the
books again. 

 

Lazy, trite anti-science and anti-technology attitudes are widely absorbed
by default over coffee at the student center and in the faculty lounge.
They're as thoroughly woven into the liberal (and liberal-arts) intellectual
sensibility of my lifetime as an eager faith in Newtonian enlightenment was
in one earlier epoch, or an embrace of social/technical progress in harness
with liberal reform in another. And they're typically founded in all the
rich knowledge and understanding of science displayed by the editors of
Social Text in 1996.

 

But there's so much more complexity, nuance and contradiction in Pynchon's
treatment of science and technology than the lazy view takes in. It's patent
that he has read and thought about them, wrestled with his own feelings
about them, far more deeply than someone simply gathering sticks to beat
them with. To me, saying "Pynchon is anti-science and anti-technology"
[because hey, all thoughtful and sensitive souls engaged with literary
fiction inevitably are, amirite?] is like saying "Vineland is about how
groovy the sixties were and how sad it is that the Man crushed all our
bright hopes."   

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Mark Kohut
Sent: Monday, June 03, 2013 4:32 PM
To: pynchon -l
Subject: Well, Pynchon seems to have

 

some anti-technology and/or anti-science stuff of some kind going on in his
mind

which I dangle as a pendant to the recent thread.

 

I offer the Luddite N-F piece...and some stuff in AtD as circumstantial
evidence. 

 

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