Pynchon and western civilization.

[Joseph Tracy]

 Pynchon has always had a prophetic eye for the trends shaping civilization and the US/ Anglo part of that in particular: Since COL 49 he has been pointing out the IT/net-tech role in big power games but that is one of many themes he has been focused on for years. 


 In GR it was behavior mod, technological systems control, war as a market mechanism, the mythical power of Calvinism, the sexual component of weapons;  

In V and ATD it was the great game as the modern incarnation of secret power; racism backed up by calssism as a foundation for imperialism, the transition from kingdosms to  nation states to corporatized government; the war against organized labor; the unsavory beauty of the seekers the lost, the lonely, the preterite, the sheer weirdness of both religious and cultural colonialism and the forms of  debauchery or resistance it brings about.

In M& D ATD, Vineland  and all P books that followed it was Cartesian thought maps and imperial claims versus the fractal wildness of a  natural order;  real estate empires and the rentier class as a primary driver of western power; the control of comunication systems from the renaissance to the age of TV to the internet; the use of police to control  uncooperative populations,  the dream of artificial intelligence from Vaukonsons duck to IT, our secret attraction to fascism, the question of what time travel might actually show us, the nature of communities of resistance vs the families, obsessions  and servants of the powerful.

The nature and appeal and forms of resistance are also universal concerns in 2 ways- as practical earthly resistance: revoution, labor organizing, personal refusal.  The other major form of resistance that seems to be fading in IV and BE but is powerfully present from GR to M&D and present as a kind of ghost in IV and BE is in the form of the individual mystical connection to a sacred community or to nature, a form that steps away from the large power dramas to accept a more transcendent set of values and practices. Perhaps when a civilization gives up on heaven it begins like Windust to dream only of the compartments of hell.