Mapping the World: Thomas Pynchon's Global Novels

[Monte Davis]

It's not likely P will "address this situation" -- surely not at the
GR-M&D-AtD scale and scope. If he does, I'm only 13 years younger and will
want full details on his organ transplants.

I take your points on the Middle East, but zoom out enough and it starts to
seem a blip, like that little dust-up between ICI/GE and IG Farben/Siemens.
The broader and deeper prospects are showing up all around us -- e.g., as I
noted here recently, the quavers on Wall Street (and on London, Frankfurt,
Paris, Moscow exchanges) generated by economic reports from China.  All my
life I've heard foreign commodity suppliers saying "when the US gets a cold
we get pneumonia," or Pierre Trudeau's "Living next you is in some ways
like sleeping with an elephant." The US and the European movers and shakers
of the past 500 years are going to have to get used to *our* affairs being
affected, sometimes dominated, by decisions made (and increasingly,
innovations arising) in China, India, Brazil, Nigeria...

I'm captivated by Beckert's book in part because, like M&D, it extends my
Pynchonian worldview past the steel-chemicals-electronic nexus of GR...

Past the railroads-telegraph-mining nexus of AtD..

To cotton, after food itself probably the biggest local/regional nexus of
labor and commerce from prehistory through the M&D years.

China and India (along with Africa, Mexico and what are now Islamic
regions) absolutely *owned* cotton culture, processing and trade from
3000-2000 BC on, with tiny amounts reaching Europe -- as exotic and
marvelous as silk -- through classical and medieval times.

In the Renaissance "the West" started buying more from them. In early
modern times it took over the oceanic trade (half of all West African
slaves were bought with Indian and Ottoman cotton cloth passed through
Mediterranean/Iberian ports, then Liverpool). From the late 18th century it
explosively took over processing -- and because traditional suppliers
couldn't keep up, created its own vast, cruel resource zone in the
Caribbean, Brazil, and the southern US states.

That lasted ~150 years -- but now it has all flipped back. The
cotton-growing regions again dominate the global integrated enterprise in
all but the fashion/retail "tail end" in the West.

Mining, metals, chemicals, electronics, energy, more and more mass-produced
consumer goods: "no bleeding use, it's gone, another gone, another, oh
dear," as poor Brigadier Pudding sez.

On Fri, Jan 22, 2016 at 9:58 AM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>> The other day, I wrote here that Beckert's Empire of Cotton helps to
>> frame important themes of "P's grandest narrative, which is really
>> *everything* that boiled out of Europe across five other continents -- plus
>> the occasional Vheissu and Vormance ventures -- from 1500 to 2000." That's
>> still Eurocentric, but I don't think many Asians, Africans, Australians,
>> and non-US Western Hemisphereans would deny that much of their history over
>> these centuries was importantly, often decisively *knotted into* that of
>> Europe and, more recently, the US.
>>
>
> In most cases that knotting into had serious and ugly repercussions for
> the third world w/r/t to colonialism, imperialism and later global capital.
> conventional wisdom we all are on board. What makes all of this interesting
> today is the unique nature of Saudi Arabia whose internal cultural beliefs,
> biases and obsessions were not much changed by outside forces, Wahhabism
> was ever the stronger . Its arch enemy Iran flipped the script by expelling
> those outside forces in 1979. Israel too has its religious fanatics now,
> many in the settler movement consider Bibi a sell-out which is a bit of
> poetic justice considering how he feed the fire resulting in Rabin's
> assassination.
> I guess what Im saying is despite the effects of empire and global capital
> and all that he's demonstrated, how does someone like Pynchon address this
> situation since it would appear he's said what he had to say colonialsm
> beyond the alluded to dreams of small-scale utopias whether it be
> anarchism, deep archer, etc.
>
>
>
> rich
>
>
>
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