TRP and Science 2 (was: Science Plays God)

[Markekohut]

Yes, I'll agree, Pynchon knows the beauty of doing science. He also knows the beauty of love but 
His books are full of the perversion of Love. I say he is hardly writing about doing science, unlike C.P.Snow whose boring shelves of novels are already  in the dustbin of history. 
He is writing about the human dimensions of The Scientific Age....when the tower is everywhere,
when History, a Step-Function, can be ended via Modern Science's Technological Power....
when people no longer live under the overarching emotional spires of Mont-Saint Michel & Chartres and what does that mean, to go wayback conceptually?

I Also do not think it is right to call his immersive use of science and technology BAIT because he might be satirizing it. He wanted to say EVERYTHING important about life in his time. Science and modern technology and their effects simply ARE very important....( if you believe that scientific knowledge advances, as almost all of us do, then it is more pervasive than at any time in history, no?) 

TRP, like Norman Mailer, say, was good at science and math. Mailer majored in aeronautical engineering, although he, like TRP, always wanted to be a writer...Norm said it had two advantages for a would-be writer: help him to perspectives on the world that did not come from other writers. Gave him a stock of different metaphors. 

Just to answer whether TRP would immerse himself so much in Science just to make jokes, the answer is NO. He made metaphoric use of it all...( v. Obliquely I sometimes  think of Conrad's exhortation: In the destructive element immerse!..pretty damn true of GR in one sense, yes?) 

Yes, I do think TRP uses modern science and math in AtD to make larger thematic points....
I think he does indict some directions the World has taken. That includes much of The Scientific Age. He focuses on the Lost, W.A.S.T.E, as we know, not the wonders of penicillin. 

2of 2 

Sent from my iPad

On Jun 12, 2013, at 6:38 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> So… about this “two cultures” thing. One strong element is traceable as far back as the pastoral mode. By 600 BCE in Greece, it was an established trope in Greece 500BC that there had been a golden age when we were at one with the natural  world, but cities / commerce / too much book-learning, or some other apple we shouldn’t have eaten, were drawing us away from all that. Nymphs and shepherds in Arcadia, Works and Days, Virgil’s Eclogues, blah blah blah. I’ve read that there are counterpart tropes in the oldest Egyptian and Chinese literature; I suspect that Mohenjo-Daro and Jericho 1.0 had them, too,  but evidence is sparse.  
>  
> But for modern English-speaking readers, surely the taproot is in the English Romantics. Their nation was the cutting edge of industrialization and urbanization; their time was when the feedbacks among science, technology and engineering really picked up speed – when invention became a businesslike craft. It wasn’t just urban life, getting and spending, that laid waste our powers: it was those damn machines, and theories, and those Morlocks working on better ones.  Any halfway educated reader should recognize Keats’ lament in  Lamia:
>  
> Do not all charms fly
> At the mere touch of cold philosophy?
> There was an awful rainbow once in heaven:
> We know her woof, her texture; she is given
> In the dull catalogue of common things.
> Philosophy will clip an Angel's wings,
> Conquer all mysteries by rule and line,
> Empty the haunted air, and gnomèd mine—
> Unweave a rainbow…
>  
> Or Wordsworth claiming that the countryside lets us intuit all that’s worth knowing:
>  
> One impulse from a vernal wood
> May teach you more of man,
> Of moral evil and of good,
> Than all the sages can.
>  
> Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
> Our meddling intellect
> Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:--
> We murder to dissect.
>  
> Enough of Science and of Art;
> Close up those barren leaves;
> Come forth, and bring with you a heart
> That watches and receives.
>  
> A-and hey, foax, do I have to remind you of those dark satanic mills? We’ve seen them again in Saruman’s caverns, contrasted them with the sweet fields of the Shire and the quiet forests of Lothlorien. Aren’t the scientists and engineers obviously the bad wizards and the orcs?
>  
> Capitalism, the industrial revolution, colonialism/imperialism, poor Charlie C in Modern Times, the technological horrors of world war, automation breeding alienation, rape of the good green earth -- don’t we all know that science and technology did all that because they just wouldn’t listen to the awesome poets? If we read and think and care about human values, isn’t it obvious that we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden?
>  
> OK, enough. You know the drill. There’s nobody here who couldn’t vamp on this for pages. In fact,  it’s part of the default worldview for most people of literary and artistic culture. It’s why, as Snow  said, the scientist who knows nothing of Shakespeare is *expected* to be embarrassed if the Bard comes up in conversation, but the writer or artist who knows nothing of thermodynamics is *expected* to laugh it off: “I never was any good at math.”
>  
> The relationship of the two cultures is not symmetrical. It’s not just that they have different sets of values; one side claims the exclusive right -- because it’s all about *people*, and only people have values and give them meaning -- to define what is a value, and why this value merits priority over that one. Curtis White’s got all the latest steps:
>  
> http://www.amazon.com/Science-Delusion-Questions-Culture-Answers/dp/1612192009/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371071064&sr=1-1
>  
> I’m part of that cultural configuration, too. And the default view is indeed there to be found  all through Pynchon.  Who doesn’t  pick up on Rachel Owlglass’s unhealthy relationship with her car shift, and that pervert Nefastis’s rap about Maxwell’s Demon? And it’s genuinely powerful and chilling when Pynchon goes all Dante on some shlub of an engineer’s short-sighted career choices, because he knows and we know the carnage that will flow from it.
>  
> The trouble is, a few pages away there’s some beautiful, empathic, *knowing* passage about the beauty and transcendence of a formula or aerodynamic principle that drew the shlub into engineering in the first place. And over there are Chas and Jer, wringing out the last systematic errors from their obs and getting it by-god right. And somehow it feels right that it feels so good to them. (I know that one, because I spent some time on a survey crew, as did Benny; it wouldn’t surprise me if TRP the town surveyor’s son did too.) And as we survey, going by on the road is Merle, moving on “to salts of gold, platinum, copper, nickel, uranium, molybdenum, and antimony, abandoning metallic compounds after a while for resins, squashed bugs, coal-tar dyes, cigar smoke, wildflower extracts, urine from various critters including himself…”  This is all actual photochemistry, people, not handwaving.
>  
> Tell me: is it really plausible that all this (and a metric buttload more) is there as nothing more than bait? As examples of how people get drawn to the Dark Side? If these are just the snares that lead sinners into doomed congress with science and technology, he’s sure putting a lot of work into them, isn’t he?
>  
> No – wait. Just spitballing here… but could it be that there’s more going on in Pynchon than a superbly written 10,000th version of Keats’ and Wordsworth’s warnings? Is it possible that at the same time he is suspicious and minatory and worried about science and technology (and he is, like so many other writers),  he is also (like very few others in literary fiction) really interested in it? Attracted to it? Even fascinated by it? Concerned to show us some real, important human values that come to us through, even because of, math and science and technology?
>  
> Could it be that the more understanding of science and technology you bring to his fiction (and Alice notwithstanding, he brings a lot himself), the richer and more interesting it gets?  
>  
> Nah. That’s crazy talk.
>  
> [end part two]        
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