Tesla & P's Lightening-Rod Salesmen

[alice wellintown]

Terry Reilly examines P's sources for Tesla an finds remarkable similarity
in specific passages.

In Melville's story the lightning-rod salesman, as critics have discovered,
is the wizard, Ben Franklin.

What do these fictionalized men of science tell us about the authors who
created them and the audience they created them for?

Both characters mix wizardry, magic, religion, visions, what appears to be
madness, with science,  and both may be responsible for disasters, though
the competing narratives, the meta-narratives, and so on... muddle the
facts and the biography and history.

In the end, Reilly argues that P simply doesn't take a side.






On Thu, Jun 20, 2013 at 1:46 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Terry Reilly's esay in _Corrupted Pilgrim_ is a wonderful analysis of the
> Science/Occult, of, what Weisenberg, in his GR Companion, identies as the
> points of connection between science/technology and
> ritual/religion/occult/paranormal...
>
> A brief discussion of Franklin, M&D, and then Reilly turns to AGTD, and
> Merel Rideout's job as lightening rod salesman.
>
> Melville's short story is important to this discussion.
>
> A study of interest:
>
>
> The Temporality of Allegory: Melville's "The Lightning-Rod Man"
>
> Sean Silver
>
> From: Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and
> Theory
>
> Volume 62, Number 1, Spring 2006
>
> pp. 1-33
>
>
> Melville's tale probably found such persistent acceptance because it is
> generically recognizable. It is a salesman story, what Hershel Parker
> identifies as a "little Berkshire salesman story," and it is as a salesman
> story that it seems to have found its immediate legacy: bound up in
> anthologies like Burton's *Cyclopaedia* that recycled compact stories
> with a singleness of plot and a clear thematic task. As with the other
> salesman stories in such collections, the straightforward thematic tension
> of "The Lightning-Rod Man" develops between a hard-sell door-to-door
> peddler and an acute consumer; the trick, in the salesman story, is for the
> prospective buyer to figure out what the salesman is really selling; they
> are parables of alert consumerism. The moral of the tale is always *caveat
> emptor.* **
>
> On the other hand, for all its historical popularity, the experience of
> reading "The Lightning-Rod Man," if a survey of the critical response is
> any indication, is characterized by nothing so much as the sense that all
> is not as it seems, here. For one thing, the salesman and his buyer are
> talking about a lightning-rod, but their dialogue seems to be orbiting into
> vocabularies not properly about lightning-rods: about Catholic indulgences,
> or rosaries, or scepters, tri-forked things, and Leyden jars. And, more
> telling, the sale of the rod never seems to turn on questions appropriate
> to the purchase of a lightning-rod; questions of voltage differentials and
> electrical resistance, of conductivity and the strange logic of electric
> "fluid" never quite come up. This is partly to say that thematic desire is
> very much like the critical desire that is implied in it; they both turn on
> a question first put by Melville's narrator in the opening paragraph of the
> tale: "what is that strange-looking walking-stick he carries?" (118, 122).
> Whatever it is, it is more than just an every-day lightning-rod. In Ben
> Kimpel's words, "obviously there is some allegory here" (30).
>
> Yet, if it is an allegory, it is an allegory of a particularly New England
> sort, allegory of the right sort, the Puritan sort of allegory. For "The
> Lightning-Rod Man" declines to invent a fiction out of the raw material of
> fancy. Instead, it insists on the literal fact of the lightning-rod as a
> lightning-rod just as it insists on the historicity of its figures; it is
> as much about the history of New England Protestantism as it is about one
> of the principle challenges to New England Protestant theology: the advent
> of the lightning-rod itself. Melville would have us know that a
> lighting-rod is very much like an idol, and the lightning-rod consumer is
> vulnerable to the charge of idolatry; placing trust in a lightning-rod is
> very much like putting one's refuge in means and creatures rather than in
> God. As such, an ethical consideration of the lightning-rod, in the New
> England tradition of allegory, finds its most proper language in the
> rhetoric of post-Calvinist theology.
>
>
>
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130621/36ad51e7/attachment.html>