The 'Journey of Life' in American Life and Literature

Fri Sep 4 03:54:20 CDT 2015

The Pynchon/Heidegger connection is mainly about technology.

Here comes something new --

The Hyperobject's Atomization of "Self" in Gravity's Rainbow

by T.J. Martinson

 > ... In a 2001 article, Patrick McHugh suggests that Pynchon uses 
Heideggerian ontology as a meta-representation of the radicalism and 
cultural revolution represented in /Gravity’s Rainbow/. This particular 
claim is far outside the scope of the current essay, but it holds true 
that there are uncanny parallels between Heidegger’s ontological work 
and Pynchon’s /Gravity’s Rainbow. /Specifically, there are similarities 
between Heidegger’s notion of “equipment” and Pynchon’s Schwarzgerät, a 
component of the Rocket itself. In /Being and Time/, Heidegger refines 
his use of the word “things” and opts that instead, “We shall call those 
entities which we encounter in concern ‘/equipment/’” (*97 
<https://www.pynchon.net/articles/10.7766/orbit.v3.1.145/#ID11f70841-9590-4d68-aacf-859d22797523>*). 
Writing in German, Heidegger used the word /Zeug/, which, as the 
translators John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson mention in a footnote, 
“has no precise English equivalent. While it may mean any implement, 
instrument, or tool, Heidegger uses it for the most part as a collective 
noun which is analogous to our relatively specific ‘gear’ […] or the 
still more general ‘equipment’” (*97 
<https://www.pynchon.net/articles/10.7766/orbit.v3.1.145/#ID11f70841-9590-4d68-aacf-859d22797523>*). 
Similarly, /Gerät/ (of Schwarzgerät) is without a precise English 
equivalent; it can be translated as “device”—or, like /Zeug/, 
as—“equipment,” “instrument,” or even “tool.” Schwarzgerät (which has 
mostly been referred to as “black device” within Pynchon studies) 
already bears resemblance to Heidegger’s “equipment.” In /Gravity’s 
Rainbow/, Enzian (a native speaker of German) translates Schwarzgerät 
for the English-speaking Slothrop as “Blackinstrument” (/GR/ 369) ... 
What is occasionally referred to as the “black device” throughout the 
novel could just as well be called the “black instrument” or, taking 
Heidegger’s possible influence into consideration, “black equipment.” 
What such a reading would imply for the Rocket and the Schwarzgerät is 
quite simple in the context of a previous quote from Heidegger. A thing 
is inherently, proximally hidden: “[Objects] never show themselves 
proximally as they are for themselves, so as to add up to a sum of 
realia and fill up a room” (*Heidegger 98 
<https://www.pynchon.net/articles/10.7766/orbit.v3.1.145/#ID11f70841-9590-4d68-aacf-859d22797523>*). 
The Rocket and Schwarzgerät are perfect manifestations of “proximally 
hidden” objects. Though their existence is documented in dossiers and 
reports, they remain in a constant state of /elsewhere/. As the narrator 
says about the workers in the factory that produced the Schwarzgerät: 
“Whatever the new device [the Schwarzgerät] was, nobody saw it” (/GR/ 
439). While the analogue alone would provide for an interesting analysis 
of the Schwarzgerät, I am interested in pushing the Heideggerian 
analogue toward a recent concept born of OOO: the hyperobject. At once 
strikingly familiar to Heidegger’s object, yet hauntingly different, the 
hyperobject, which will be discussed at length later on, offers the most 
chillingly accurate analogue of the elusive Rocket and its Schwarzgerät 
...<

https://www.pynchon.net/articles/10.7766/orbit.v3.1.145/

Martinson tries to understand Gravity's Rainbow with the help of Being 
and Time, even more fruitful it appears to me to read Pynchon's work in 
the perspective of The Question Concerning Technology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Question_Concerning_Technology
http://simondon.ocular-witness.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/question_concerning_technology.pdf

On 04.09.2015 09:49, jochen stremmel wrote:
> Of all the catchwords there (in the context of American Life and 
> Literature) one puzzles me a bit: Heidegger, Martin. Kind of a 
> "ceterum censeo"?
>
> 2015-09-04 8:41 GMT+02:00 Kai Frederik Lorentzen <lorentzen at hotmail.de 
> <mailto:lorentzen at hotmail.de>>:
>
>
>     > The papers collected in this volume were presented at a
>     conference on “The Journey of Life” which took place at Paderborn
>     University in October 2013. They focus on a perennially recurring
>     archetype of the human imagination which, for obvious reasons, is
>     especially influential in the U.S. The articles offer exemplary
>     insights into the manifestations and functions of the ‘journey of
>     life’ concept in both American life and literature. Some
>     contributions deal with ‘real’ journeys ranging from the westward
>     travels of pioneer women physicians in the nineteenth century
>     through Jack London’s ‘journeys of life’ to the attempts at
>     tinkering with the human journey of life in the age of
>     biotechnology. Other contributions present a taxonomy of journey
>     types in American fiction, and they analyze literary journeys from
>     the omnipresent journeys in Thomas Pynchon’s novels and the
>     post-apocalyptic journey in Cormac McCarthy’s ‘The Road’ through
>     the journey plot in Robert Kirkman’s serial comic ‘The Walking
>     Dead’ and the various kinds of journeys in Western films to the
>     journeys of initiation in Sherman Alexie’s ‘The Absolutely True
>     Diary of a Part-Time Indian’ and José Antonio Villarréal’s ‘Pocho’. <
>
>     https://www.winter-verlag.de/en/detail/978-3-8253-7518-8/Freese_Ed_The_Journey_of_Life_PDF/
>
>     -
>     Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
>

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