NP's "is it ok to be a luddite?"

[ish mailian]

Is there a pattern to Pynchon's interest in automation and the work place?
And has that patter been broken (during, after Vineland)?

Pynchon in the Navy and working at Boeing, Benny's Yo-Yo labor, like
Slothrop's peregrinations, shattering, invisibility... an American GI...a
Rocketman....a  swing shift from the government job to the military
industrial complex, is a pattern that is still there in Vineland with Zoyd,
who lives off a government check, but has moved as far away from Boeing as
he can get, works a gypsy roofer, though he's married to Labor and all her
fragmented workings, globalization has taken hold.

All are highly influenced by Orwell's 1984, the year he set the novel VL
in, the year he published Luddite...and later he would publish an
INtroduction to Orwell's classic.

But the government is a paternalistic force, from V., where we see Benny
sucking on the rubber breasts in the sailor's grave after he has been
weened from the government's tit (the Navy), and the MID, the global
capital, the late capital forces are not only dehumanizing, but against
life, all life, nature and her scatterbrained creation.

Readers of P, have, I suspect, misread his works as predictions of,
callings for, the end of capital and American hegemony.  It's OK to Dream,
to wish, to hope, but the inexorable force in these works  is not Marxist,
is not even economic.

So in the later novels there is more not less capitalism.



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