BtZ42 Section 9 (pp 53-60): the Antipointsman

[ish mailian]

his chapter turns to how, in the early 18th century, Gothic fiction
moved away from the ‘explained supernatural’ and ‘accepted
supernatural’ of the earlier Gothic of Walpole, Reeve, Radcliffe, and
Lewis towards the use of pseudo-scientific explanation which still
leaves room for doubt and fear. Tales such as Frankensteinintroduce
and maintain the fantastic in such a way that the strange and
disturbing events of the narratives cannot be explained with any
certainty as having either supernatural or natural causes. Combining
supposedly scientific discourse with the marvellous and uncanny in
first-person narrations, such texts present us with extreme states of
consciousness which could be taken for either paranoid delusion or
demonic possession. Because Frankenstein utilizes the fantastic in
this way and also tends towards prose realism, it represents a new
development in, and revitalization of, the Gothic, while demonstrating
the continuing reliance of the genre on folk-tales, ballads, legends,
and myths for its effects.

http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198119920.001.0001/acprof-9780198119920-chapter-7

On Sun, May 15, 2016 at 8:35 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> Look, for example, at Victor's account of how he assembles and
> animates his creature. He must, of course, be a little vague about the
> details, but we're left with a procedure that seems to include
> surgery, electricity (though nothing like Whale's galvanic
> extravaganzas), chemistry, even, from dark hints about Paracelsus and
> Albertus Magnus, the still recently discredited form of magic known as
> alchemy. What is clear, though, despite the commonly depicted Bolt
> Through the Neck, is that neither the method nor the creature that
> results is mechanical.
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/05/18/reviews/pynchon-luddite.html
>
> On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:14 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Another great post, Monte, imho. Shows TRP with another use of either-or, no
>> excluded middle and therefore of
>> the scientific understanding and attempt at control as ...also a metaphor.
>>
>> On Thu, May 12, 2016 at 9:00 AM, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> pp. 53-54 (Viking pagination)
>>> Notice the slide from Jessica's narrative present through a recalled
>>> conversation ("Roger has tried to explain...") to The White Visitation ("his
>>> little bureau"). He's the one-man Statistics Office.
>>>
>>> "576 squares" implies a 24x24 grid of squares half a kilometer on a side.
>>> So Roger's sampling area is 12 km (~7.5 miles) on a side, 56 sq mi -- about
>>> a tenth of Greater London's built-up area. If it's centered at Charing
>>> Cross, then very roughly from Kensington east to Greenwich, and from
>>> Hampstead Heath south to Streatham Common. (UK readers please correct me if
>>> I've screwed up my map-gazing.)
>>>
>>> "An Erlenmeyer flask bubbles..." and we get a slow pan around the room,
>>> Roger's split soul captured in a book and a snapshot, as "the graying
>>> Pavlovian, thin as a needle" (heh) looks in from the hall.
>>>
>>> Zeros and ones: "Like his master I. P. Pavlov before him, [Pointsman]
>>> imagines the cortex of the brain as a mosaic of tiny on/off elements....
>>> each point is allowed only the two states: waking or sleep... all Pavlovian
>>> brain mechanics assumes the presence of these bi-stable points."
>>>
>>> In 1944, neurologists knew that neurons had an all-or-nothing threshold
>>> for "firing." But they had few details on how adjacent neurons connected,
>>> how many connections went to remote cells instead, or how many went down
>>> into deeper cortical layers rather than across the surface. They wouldn't
>>> understand the electrochemistry of the nerve impulse itself for another
>>> decade. So this flickering "mosaic," with its seductive similarity to binary
>>> circuit elements and digital computing, is an extremely stylized model.
>>>
>>> “Summation,” “transition,” “irradiation,” “concentration,” “reciprocal
>>> induction”... were not observed phenomena, but Pavlov's *inferred* building
>>> blocks for the more complex brain functions he was interested in. They all
>>> vanished from neuroscience in the 1950s and 1960s. The all-or-nothing view
>>> of neuronal activity has changed, too. While the threshold is real, it can
>>> slide up and down with the neuron's recent activity and with neurochemicals
>>> swirling around the cells -- both very different from the simple, fixed
>>> determinism of switches, relays or transistors.
>>>
>>> Bottom line: what P wrote in GR about, e.g., V-2 guidance was actual
>>> engineering that had been built and had worked. What he wrote about
>>> Pointsman's neuroscience was less "modern science" as of the date of writing
>>> than it was akin to the Magnetick Hi-Jinks in Mason & Dixon, or Aetherism in
>>> Against the Day. And he knew it.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
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