Auerbach's take on Adams

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

I like his overall schema too, but his take on Adams is not 
appropriate.  You cannot make the distinction dynamo vs. idyll in an 
Pynchon essay without evoking Adams' original one of dynamo vs. Virgin. 
But who reads Adams today? So most readers of Auerbach's essay will 
think that he came on his distinction without any inspiration. That it 
simply fell from the sky. Auerbach also misrepresents Adams insofar as 
he seems to file him under conspiracy theory. Actually "The Education Of 
Henry Adams" is, despite its occasional antisemitism, not a conspiracy 
theory.

When I think about a possible reason for the fact that Auerbach does not 
deal with Adams properly, it occurs to me that the necessary debate 
would perhaps damage his whole model. Adams is - just like "Road 
Runner", or Thelonious Monk - a major influence on Pynchon. So it's a 
little silly when Auerbach says that Adams' usage of the concept 
'dynamo' was "heavily influential to Mr. Pynchon". The influence was 
never restricted to that term. In the end of the "Slow Learner" intro 
Pynchon speaks of Adams in a way that makes his primary indebtedness 
clear.  And where's the idyll in "V"? I don't see this. What I see 
instead is that the spectrum of possible meanings of V contains also 
Venus and the Virgin. Actually the connecting of Venus and Virgin in 
chapter XXV of "The Education Of Henry Adams" might have been an 
inspiration for the whole idea to focus on the quest for a female entity 
named V.

The complex relation of Pynchon and Adams needs closer examination than 
Auerbach delivers.


On 25.10.2013 23:05, Heikki Raudaskoski wrote:
> I wrote in an earlier message today:
>
> "I didn't understand Auerbach's concept of the idyll as a reformulation of
> the Virgin (it's very possible that I didn't read the essay carefully...).
>
> I perceived it more as a dynamo-resisting 'alternative realm', or even
> 'pastoral' in some post-Empsonian sense."
>
>
> And as I now revisited Auerbach's essay, it does seem that I was close,
> after all. It does also seem that A. takes dynamo from Adams somewhat
> lopsidedly, leaving the Virgin out of his "general theory of Pynchon".
>
> "The dynamo is the *locus classicus* of a conspiracy theory. In Henry
> Adams's usage, heavily influential to Mr. Pynchon, the dynamo steamrolls
> freedom and individuality while trying to establish its tyranny of order.
> For Adams, the dynamo looked to be winning. For Mr. Pynchon, every dynamo
> ultimately fails - it is no match for a Decoherence Event [for Auerbach,
> the third crucial motif in Pynchon's novels, HR] - but each does plenty
> of damage in the process."
>
> The idyll is something of a reaction to the dynamo:
>
> "Our explanations for the world, paranoid or not, are what stop us from
> being anti-paranoid 'zombies'. But beyond paranoia proper, anti-paranoia
> also produces a second and more humane response, which is the faith in a
> safe haven, a space that resists the dynamo's control and attempts to
> embrace the wretched of the earth. Mr. Pynchon does not believe in the
> *reality* of such spaces, but he believes in the therapeutic worth of the
> *ideas* of such spaces."
>
> What Pynchon believes remains a matter of dispute, IMO. (And does
> DeepArcher, for Auerbach the idyll in BE, really attempt 'to embrace
> the wretched of the earth' in the novel?) However, I dig Auerbach's
> overall schema.
>
>
> On Fri, 25 Oct 2013, Mark Kohut wrote:
>
>> I don't, without rereading and thinking about Auerbach's review, see much to the Virgin/dynamo/idyll stuff
>> in BE....and if he gets Virgin wrong, why follow the metaphoric use?
>>
>>
>>
>> On Friday, October 25, 2013 6:39 AM, Kai Frederik Lorentzen<lorentzen at hotmail.de>  wrote:
>>
>>
>> The problem I have with this is his understanding of "Virgin" as
>> "idyll". I just reread chapter XXV of "The Education Of Henry Adams" and
>> I don't think that Adams would accept "idyll" as a reformulation.
>> "Symbol or energy, the Virgin had acted as the greatest force in the
>> Western world ever felt, and had drawn man's activities to herself more
>> strongly than any other power, natural or supernatural, had ever done
>> (...)". Sounds not like "idyll", does it? Sure, Auerbach is writing
>> about Pynchon, but he reformulates Adams' distinction as if there was no
>> problem, as if his "idyll" was not just some decaffeinated version of
>> Adams' "Virgin". Also not sure that "idyll" is what Pynchon's
>> counternarratives are about.
>>
>>>> However, I'm thinking of the dynamo/idyll motifs introduced by Auerbach in
>> his savvy review of BE. According to Auerbach, Deseret/hashslingrz make
>> the dynamo and DeepArcher the idyll in BE. Compared to BE, the preterite
>> are much more involved in the tension between the corresponding dynamo and
>> idyll motifs in, say, TCoL49 or GR, IMO. Auerbach does not explicate them
>> but I'd say that in TCol49, these motifs are Inverarity's will/W.A.S.T.E.,
>> and in GR, the Rocket/the Zone.<<
>>
>>
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