Marx, Iliad, Pyn, Mutatis mutandis

[Matthew Cissell]

"Could Homer's Iliad have been written in a world that already knew gunpowder?" The question of Marx asks how new technology changes our perception in general and the writer's imagination in particular..." Perhaps one should look beyond the technology to all the other changes that come with it, afterall gunpowder also means the slow death of castles and castle life. 

Let me explain by citing John Speller on Bourdieu: "...many works might never have been written, or at least not the way they were, if their authors had been recognised from the outset for the qualities for which they are celebrated in retrospect (RA 382). In this way, an artist's 'creative project' is variable, depending on the state of the field and the reception (s)he recieves. It is enough to imagine, suggests Bourdieu, what Zola, Barcos, or Flaubert, might have written, had they been transported to an earlier of later state of the field, and found a different occasion to express their dispositions (for instance, if Flaubert had encountered the theory of the novel which meets modern writers, and which his work has doen much to inspire), to see that their 'projet créateurs' - and so their entire oevre - would have been entirely different (RA 385)".

We could look at Goethe's Faust and see how the changes in its development reflect Goethe's trajectory through the changing social field of his time. The final version of Part II would have been unthinkable for Goethe prior to the 1800's.

CL49 could only have been written when and where it was written. Put Pyn in Bell labs and you get a (very) different book. Perhaps he wouldn't have come across the Varo's "Bordando" painting (painted in '61, just 2 yrs before her death). 

ciao
mc


________________________________
From: Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
To: Monte Davis <montedavis at verizon.net>; pynchon-l at waste.org 
Sent: Wednesday, June 19, 2013 12:38 PM
Subject: Re: The ugly truth of science




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] 
>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?”<<