TRP and Science 1 (was: Science Plays God)

[Monte Davis]

I'm changing the title from the Faustian/Shelleyan 'Science Plays God.' I do
so not because Pynchon doesn't know, use, and riff brilliantly on the
Faustian/Shelleyan stance - of course he does - but because he also takes
many other stances (Promethean, Apollonian, Enlightenment, and
Wellsian-through-mid-20th-century-American-science-fictional, among others)
towards science, technology, their role in political and economic power, and
the human use of human beings.

 

***

You say "I support a pluralistic approach." 

 

Ten days ago, you said: "Science is the project of little men who are easily
enslaved and who crave authority, though it is, at the same time, and
necessarily so, rebellious."

 

Your claim of pluralism is impossible to reconcile with the earlier
statement's hostility, condescension, and contempt for - not to mention its
ignorance of -- living, breathing human beings engaged in science. 

 

It is impossible to reconcile with your repeated assertions that science and
technology in Pynchon are incidental window-dressing, with no significant
bearing on his Real, Central Humanist Concerns. For example, you insisted a
year or two back that once we've grasped the racial/mathematical pun in The
Secret Integration, there's nothing really new or worth talking about in
GR's hundreds of overt and covert references to integration,
differentiation, analysis, dv/dt's, summa-shaped tunnels, summing
integrators in the A4's control system, stepped Dutch and Hanseatic gables,
and motion (?) from 24 still frames per second in Gravity's Rainbow.

 

Me, I think that when an author spends nine years expanding a short story's
play on words (shallow, albeit morally freighted) into one of the central,
ramifying themes of a magnificent 750-page novel - demonstrating a much more
than casual familiarity with the history and uses of calculus as well as
synthetic chemistry, control theory, 1930s rocketry, usw - it suggests that
he finds math, the sciences built on that math, and the technologies built
on those sciences to be worth knowing about and thinking about in some
depth.

 

It suggests that it might help Pynchon readers to bring to the books not
just some Heidegger and Ellul and good ol' Norman O. Brown, but maybe some
Newton, Liebig, James Clerk Maxwell, von Braun, Norbert Wiener - and yes,
even Tesla.

 

Along with comparable richnesses in Mason & Dixon and AtD, it suggests that
like DeLillo in Ratner's Star and Underworld, like Richard Powers throughout
his career, like Vonnegut at his sporadic best -- and like very few other
important modern authors --  Pynchon *engages* with science and technology
in a way that makes your "one need know very little [Tesla or physics or
anything else outside the MLA-Wellintown canon] to write or read such
novels" sound not just stupid, but smug about it. 

 

But then, as someone who once prepared to engage in "the project of little
men who are easily enslaved," and has subsequently spent decades talking to
and writing about such Morlocks -- I would say that, wouldn't I? Like them,
I can only gaze wistfully at Alice, dancing pluralistically among the Eloi. 

 

[end part one]

 

From:  <mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org> owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [
<mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org> mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On
Behalf Of alice wellintown
Sent: Wednesday, June 12, 2013 5:54 AM
To: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: Science Plays God

 

Equipped for what, dude? Reading Pynchon is tough. Hey, that's one of the
reasons I've been doing it all these years, one of the reasons I read all
that stuff other readers write about P's works. I appreciate the experts,
the people who come at the text from a focused angle,  who dive down deep
into a passage and make connections with other texts and ideas, experts from
other disciplines who enrich my reading.

 

 I support a pluralistic approach. 

 

But your approach is to deny the carpenter. He's the little man. Your the
expert who has esoteric knowledge the rest of don't and can never have. A
member of the elect. That's you, Monte. So fucking rocket science. 

 

And, don't confuse me with others who can't kick your ass in the science
ring. 

 

 

And remember, you had trouble reading Pynchon's prose. His irony fooled you
into thinking you were equipped. 

 

[earlier post]

I don't know if Pynchon consults with scientists, but to write a novel the
ones he's written, or to read one, and this is far more important to our
discussion, one need know very little about Tesla or Physics. 

 

 

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