TRP, the Romantic Tradition, and Something Else

[Monte Davis]

Thanks for engaging with this, Mark. I left too many dots unconnected.

 

MK> My memory of Snow's " Two Cultures" essay finds it hard to connect with the " golden age" trope.

That the Garden of Eden Myth exists so nearly universally, might say something about our Human Nature, Psyche or Collective Unconscious, yes?

 

Some variant of Eden/Golden Age <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Age>  trope was probably inescapable, based on  (1) the shared individual experience of growing out of infancy and childhood, no longer having all our needs met by all-powerful parents, and (2) the slowly spreading cultural experience of historical change. I.e., somewhere between first agriculture and first cities, every Grandma/Grandpa’s “things are worse than when I was young” coalesces in a collective “game is becoming scarcer, there are more cultivated fields so we have to walk farther to work them, soil’s wearing out, gotta dig the wells deeper,” etc. etc.

 

With that universal baseline, even the earliest technology (long before science, industrialization etc) can be folded in, e.g. the Hesiod/Plato sequence of golden, silver, bronze, iron age. No matter that gold and silver in fact had never been “everyday” metals or used for tools – it was the pattern of valuable -> less valuable, rare -> common, ancient good times -> present bad times that counted, not proto-historical fact. Sometimes the pattern was explicitly tied into an Eden myth (the world’s going downhill because we sinned), sometimes not.

 

Lots of new, specifically Western European wrinkles come with the Renaissance: there was rediscovery of lots of classical Greek/Roman literature and culture, with

 

(1) great reverence for (and emulation of) classical models in epic/lyric/pastoral poetry,

 

(2) dawning awareness in Giotto and Dante and Chaucer and Michelangelo and Durer and Shakespeare – even as  they piously re-did classical subjects – that they were creating anew, going *beyond* the classical masters of the good old days

 

(3) the first stirrings of recognizably modern science, powerful new technologies of gunpowder and sailing ships, finance, new nation-states, exploration/colonization plus slave trade, etc. Combine #2 and #3, and you got that virtu – that amoral, irresistible, repellent/attractive energy -- that’s all through V.

 

I picked out the English Romantics because (at least in  the cultural/literary tradition I come from) all this acquired a sharper focus then and there, in a way that can be traced very clearly for the ensuing 200 years and counting. If you were Blake or Keats or Wordsworth or Coleridge or the Shelleys or Southey or…, you could look one way at pastoral/rural life that hadn’t changed much in centuries, and another way at enclosure (Big Wool) driving former farmers into metastatically growing London and Manchester and Birmingham, at burgeoninbg steam power, steel replacing iron, at first MacAdam’s all-weather roads and then oh shit here comes the locomotive…  

 

And  over in Italy, Galvani is making dead frog legs twitch with this “electricity” stuff: hello, Frankenstein’s monster.  As Mary Shelley reminds us with several Hollywood blockbusters a year, that was at least as scary in 1818 as any news of cloning or neuroscience or artificial intelligence is today. The very old “don’t eat that apple“ morphs via “There are things man was not meant to know” into “Science Plays God.” It had been there in Prometheus and Dr. Faustus, but now it was getting organized, scaling up and speeding up, as Whewell <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Whewell>   got ready to turn “natural philosopher” into his new word  “scientist.”

 

And as smokestacks replace haystacks, the very old Eden/Arcadia/Golden Age pastoral morphs into “dark satanic mills”, on its way to Dickens and Marx, to Upton Sinclair and Frank Norris, to Joni Mitchell’s “They paved Paradise and put up a parking lot” and “Got to get ourselves back to the Garden.”

 

MK> Setting up " the awesome poets" sarcastically… is a misstep to me… the English Romantics… pointed to some truths WE had lost while scrabbling with tools and toil for our living

 

I regret the misstep – as Alice will tell you for free, I’m not very good with irony. Dead serious, straight face: It was awesome poetry. It embodies truths I believe in and feelings I have every day. I love it, I embrace its power, and I marvel at how influential it was in its own time, and has continued to be in my language and my culture, right down through Pynchon’s fiction and the latest Occupy Mordor protest. Through trilocation (crystals available on request), Tolkien’s Shire and that Hawaiian vale threatened in “The Descendants” are the Romantics’ Lake District.

 

I do not claim and have never claimed that Pynchon doesn’t richly, brilliantly embody that influence and that tradition. There is no post-WWII fiction in English that more righteously fucking smites the heart of darkness in a concentration-camp-cum-A4 factory… 

 

In 13 colonies getting ready to declare that “all men are equal,” with slaves counted as 3/5ths of a human being, Native Americans counted as speed bumps, and women not even on the radar… 

 

Or in a gloriously inventive, globalizing Atlantic culture at the end of the long nineteenth century <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_nineteenth_century> , bouncing on the high board  as it prepared to dive into 41 years of technologically nifty Hell. 

 

Pynchon also offers Romantic respite and hope (?) in many glimpses of Eden/Arcadia: that magical Midwest that Merle and Dally travel through… the beginning and ending of Vineland… moments out of the storm stolen by Roger and Jessica, or by Tyrone and Geli... the Doper’s Dream landscape of marijuana trees and giant beavers in M&D, somewhere across the Ohio, where we all might go live (and fish!) some day… even a Balkan interlude, with a monastery for Cyprian. 

 

So far so good? As far as I’m concerned, fifty years of critical response (and the response of careful readers, e.g. y’all) to Pynchon has done ample justice to all the above. I don’t have anything especially original to add to the canon of insights on Thomas R. Pynchon and His Moral/Historical/Conspiratorial Critique of Euro-American Modernity, Mos Def Including Science and Technology.

 

----

But…

 

Sometime in 1976 or soon after, just moved to a Brooklyn loft, I had a few lunches and beers with Joseph Slade <http://www.amazon.com/Writers-70s-Joseph-W-Slade/dp/B00945GX6W/ref=sr_1_7?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371222396&sr=1-7>  , then at nearby LIU. I was a Pynchon fanatic, admirer of his book, and science writer, and had some tidbits to trade about von Braun and chemistry and the history of analysis (calculus and its many many offshoots), so we talked mostly GR and science.

 

Stimulated by one of those encounters, I went home and started highlighting in my already much-marked-up second or third copy of GR. This time I was noting references to calculus and its virtually endless uses in science and technology. Before running out of steam, I had found more than a hundred very specific allusions (dv/dt, integration, Leibniz, usw) and a lot more “generic” ones (still movie frames and motion, non-film motions carefully described as step-like, persistence of vision, bits of scenery seen as areas under curves, usw).

 

And I said to myself: “Whoa…. I got it back in 1973 that imagery and language related to calculus helps tie together the Germany-parabola/rainbow-deathculture-A4 theme… but this is A LOT.” Some basic concepts – visual as much as symbolic -- of calculus seemed to be as resonant and generative for Pynchon as green fields and trees and plashing brooks had been for the Romantics. Weird shit! Except that occasionally as a science student, and occasionally as science teacher and science writer, I’d had my own flashes of such resonance when I “got” another instance of a powerful basic physical idea or mathematical relationship.

 

And I started to think that there was more going on in Pynchon than a Moral/Historical/Conspiratorial Etc., in which -- to detail the portrayal of the math/science/tech he hates and fears like all good post-Romantic literary humanists – he tossed in bits of their language and imagery only as satiric, Menippean pseudo-erudition.

 

I started to think that for Pynchon, some ideas from calculus (and chemistry, and aerodynamics, and astronomy/cartography, and electric technology, and optics, and other fields he’s browsed) are numinous, magical, opening into countless associations -- in a way not very different from the way that a rainbow, or an eclipse, or a photograph emerging from blankness in a darkroom tray, might be magical and suggestive to any of us, scientifically inclined or not.

 

And since I started to think that way, I’ve been seeing it in everything he’s written. And while the critical response (and close readers’ response, and P-list discussions) do a thorough job on his works as a Moral / Historical / Conspiratorial Critique of Euro-American Modernity, Mos Def Including Science and Technology, they don’t have much to say about the (IMHO) unmistakable fascination, attraction, maybe even love, for those ideas that coexists, page after page, book after book, with the critique. (Not “contradicts” – coexists.) 

 

Why not? Here’s where the “Two Cultures” meme comes in – and I’m speaking as someone who (1) knows just as C.P. Snow knew and Pynchon knows that that’s a massive oversimplification, and (2) has been straddling them since my teens.

 

My guess is that as Snow sez. if your education and temperament and taste and life experience lead you to identify with the culture of the humanities and literary fiction, then you tend to think of math and science and technology as things that can only captivate or hold the interest of some other kind of person. If so, you’re all set to see and understand and embrace Pynchon’s critique, with all the cultural roots and force I skimmed through above. The industrialization and urbanization and “technology-ization” that alarmed the Romantics when it was taking off is still with us, and still accelerating across the lives of several billion non-G20 people, and we all know all the Bad Shit coming from that.

 

But by the same token, being of that culture also makes it hard to imagine that a brilliant, thoughtful, humane, wise writer of great literary fiction might, at any level, be… kinda… well… y’know… into science and technology too. After all, that’s for some other kind of person. What other kind of person? Well, I suppose if you were to stretch this imaginative disability to the point of asinine caricature, you might say something like “Science is the project of little men who are easily enslaved and who crave authority.” 

 

And that’s as far as possible from Our Beloved Author.

 

Isn’t it?

 

*

 

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." 
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack Up

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130614/d28290ab/attachment.html>