The ugly truth of science

[alice wellintown]

Thanks Kai.

One of the things I've discovered recently, after I read a couple of essays
on "Entropy" (one by Seed and one by Heffernan) and the Corrupted Pilgrim's
Guide, is how blind critics are when they read what other critics have
written. Hefferan, for example, thinks Seed has got it just about right,
but he parades dozens of critics onto his pages and pushes them off like so
many underfraduates who, he suggests,  don't have the skill, the close
textual and textural reading skill to understand P's irony and how it
works. When he pushes the late great Tony Tanner off the page he does so
with a little more respect, but Tanner is tossed in the heap, swept into
the dustbin of P-Industry history wityh the rest. This is absurd enough,
and it is a habit of the academic who cuts her teeth these days, a bad one,
and on the internet, of course, where inhabitions are tossed out with the
baby and the bath water, this is a common, too common practice. So it
goes.



We can all put on Kevlar suits and burn paper at 451 degrees.

In _Brave New World_ Marx meets the philosopher king who has
the extant volumes of Shakespeare; these works are locked away from the
public-- one wonders if Winston Smith (1984), whose first crime is
thinking, which quickly leads to a more serious crime, writing, more
criminal because writing may spread thought to others, would be inspired to
write in the Brave new World, where drugs control urges and inquiries that
the state deems dangerous. In any event, Tanner talks about the subjunctive
in P. And this is a very important idea.

see Tanner, Tony.  "'The Rubbish-Tip for Subjunctive
   Hopes': Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon."
   The American Mystery: American Literature from
   Emerson to DeLillo.  New York: Cambridge UP,
   2002.  222-38.


 In _The Corrupted Pilgrim_, J. Paul Narkunas begins with this idea, this
theme that we find in P, one that has been traced to the last passage of
Fitzgerald's Gatsby, the them of failed possibilities, of what might have
been.

And P layers these historical questions, what might have been, if things
were different, onto our world.

So, immigration and nationalism. And,  multi- cultural/linguistic/ethnic
America, the [new] frontier closes, as the dynamic dance of flexible
sovereignty ...geographic political borders...is regulated...capital free,
unregulated....(239).






On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 6:47 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> Great post, Kai and I'll give my answer to,the CofL49 question. NO. In
> thunder. perhaps only Bleeding Edge could have been he predicts playfully.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Jun 19, 2013, at 6:38 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
> wrote:
>
>
> With quoting this sentence from Marx, which I recently read in a diary of
> Ernst Jünger, I implied the suggestion to focus - at this point of the
> debate - on science & technology *in literature*. Your question, in this
> regard not untypical for certain tendencies of the discussion, appears to
> me unhistorical and, thus, pretty hard to discuss. Marx' question, in
> contrast to this, is a concrete one. But it's not as simple as your answer
> to it does suggest. It's not about being in favor or against technology
> from a romantic point of view. As you know, Marx considered the optimal
> development of "the means of production", and this contains not only
> technology yet also theoretical science, as a necessary condition for
> communist society. And so he was never a Luddite but - in this a typical
> child of the 19th century - an admirer of science and its liberating
> potential. The question of Marx cannot even been answered with a simple
> "No!" While there is great fictional war literature written by
> contemporaries living with about the same technology as the warriors they
> write about - take Grimmelshausen's *Der abenteuerliche Simplicissimus
> Teutsch *(a picaro novel, dt. Schelmenroman, about the Thirty Years' War,
> published in 1668), or Mailer's *The Naked and the Dead* -  it is, for a
> great writer, absolutely possible to reconstruct the wars and the violence
> of former times. Cormac McCarthy, although living with TV and the Bomb, was
> able to picture the violence of a former century vividly in his novel *Blood
> Meridian*. So I guess it's not impossible that an author, playing in the
> league of Homer, could succeed in creating something like the *Iliad*while already living in a world that knows gunpowder. The question of Marx
> asks *how* new technology changes our perception in general and the
> writer's imagination in particular (this is, btw, exactly the approach
> Kittler applied to Pynchon's work); it also hints at the rationalization of
> war which makes archaic rage, so central to the *Iliad*, look more and
> more old-fashioned. (The counter-position is marked by James Hillman who,
> in his last book *A Terrible Love of War*, says that it's one and the
> same archetype triggered again and again, no matter whether we talk about
> the Trojan War or US-interventions in Iraq.) With view on Pynchon you may
> also ask: Could *The Crying of Lot 49* have been written in a world that
> already knew the Internet?
>
>
> On 18.06.2013 18:25, Monte Davis wrote:
>
>  Nor were armored knights amused by the longbow, or for that matter by
> peasants trained to hold a line of pikes. ****
>
> ** **
>
> *From:* Kai Frederik Lorentzen [mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de<lorentzen at hotmail.de>]
>
> *Sent:* Tuesday, June 18, 2013 12:15 PM
> *To:* Monte Davis; pynchon-l at waste.org
> *Subject:* Re: The ugly truth of science****
>
> ** **
>
>
>
> "Could Homer's *Iliad* have been written in a world that already knew
> gunpowder?"
>
> Karl Marx
>
> >>… or “Would Power and Wealth and Preterition Have Played Nicely if They
> Hadn’t Had Pointy Sticks, Metal, Gunpowder, Calculus, Steam Power, Electric
> Utilities, Behavioral Psychology, Nuclear Weapons, IT, and Genetic
> Engineering?”<<****
>
>
>
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