The implausibility of Maxine's "What" (p. 419)

[John Bailey]

I had no idea about DARPA then, in any form, really.
On 10 Jul 2015 6:35 pm, "Kai Frederik Lorentzen" <lorentzen at hotmail.de>
wrote:

>
> I understand that Pynchon wants to make Ernie's explanations more
> interactive by giving Maxine a line to throw in but how could she not know
> about DARPAnet and its function to enable communication after a nuclear
> war? When the Internet went through the roof by the mid 1990s every second
> media report on the issue had that story in extended version. How could an
> intelligent and educated person like Maxine have missed it? How could we
> imagine her not being interested in the historical origin of such a game
> changer? No, this is not plausible at all. Future editions should have,
> instead of "What," something like "But Pop, that's so long ago," an
> argument Maxine ("The Cold War ended, right?", p. 420) is trying to develop
> later in the conversation anyway. But the "What" damages the whole
> character.
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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