BtZ42. History, Cold War, point of no return.

[Mark Kohut]

Laura wrote, kindly asking me directly a question 'cause I keep bloviating
about AtD: (please all,
this question is for all of us)

Laura:
"I see GR as Pynchon's attempt to find that point - zero point, point of no
return, Brennschluss - where the Cold War was set in motion. He knew, of
course, that he'd have to go back much earlier. In GR, it's already too
late. In ATD and M&D he digs deeper. I can't offhand think of any examples,
but it seems to me that in ATD, he's presenting alternate routes that might
have been taken - Tesla, the Quaternions - Mark K., can you help here? Even
in Bleeding Edge, there's at least a vision of what might have been."

I would say that Yes AtD offers many thematic branchings of possible
alternate routes--by breadth of embodied themes. Perhaps not so localized
in time nor place but in a kind of Iceland Spar of Alternate History, such
as different sources of energy, a different world if there were no
imaginary numbers (metaphorically ), much other kinds of world richness
(and justice)...all presented conceptually, not via much arguable real
history, as I think of it.

But AtD is also, as we have all said, a presentation of modernity, (some
of) its global effects and the consequences of. I have always thought
'around 1870" as the earlier time in question, and I found this for this
post:

Wikipedia:

Charles Baudelaire <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Baudelaire> is
credited with coining the term "modernity" (*modernité*) in his 1864 essay
"The Painter of Modern Life," to designate the fleeting, ephemeral
experience of life in an urban metropolis, and the responsibility art has
to capture that experience. In this sense, it refers to a particular
relationship to time, one characterized by intense historical discontinuity
or rupture, openness to the novelty of the future, and a heightened
sensitivity to what is unique about the present (Kompridis 2006
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#CITEREFKompridis2006>, 32–59).

As an analytical concept and normative
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norm_(philosophy)> ideal, modernity is
closely linked to the ethos <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethos> of
philosophical and aesthetic modernism
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernism>; political and intellectual
currents that intersect with the Enlightenment
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment>; and subsequent
developments as diverse as Marxism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marxism>,
existentialism <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existentialism>, modern art
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_art> and the formal
establishment of social
science <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_science>. It also encompasses
the social relations associated with the rise of capitalism, and shifts in
attitudes associated with secularisation and post-industrial life
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_life> (Berman 2010
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modernity#CITEREFBerman2010>, 15–36).


Regarding the direct Cold War question: I don't see it at all in AtD since
we know of

the huge balloon-based Russo-US Chums' 'State' or Whatever--, a
transnational Alliance of some kind--- that the book builds to.


But, one smart reader, David Cowart, I think, in a lit essay I once
read----which is probably in his book or reworked into his book, which I
have not read---did argue this: V is not set in the middle of the 50s for
nothing, at the tail end of McCarthyism---where national 'spying' on the
other was patriotic--and around the Suez Crisis for nothing. He argued that
as we thought about Pynchon's vision of America (the US of A, as Jochen
more precisely prefers), we must start there not with* Lot 49 *nor even *The
Secret Integration*.  Because Cold War fifties, the Bomb and Everything
Else.
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