Erich Fromm and Pynchon

[Mark Kohut]

Do we all remember when those two Pynchon scholars
circumstantially "proved" that Pynchon was deeply influenced
by Fromm's *Escape from Freedom *in GR, at least?

And do we all remember Pynchon scoring on Marinetti & Futurism and a
speeded up world in* Against the Day,*
even to that book cover picture?

Then I send you to a later Fromm,* The Heart of Man, *1964 which in a
chapter which effectively is
a precis of N. O. Brown's *Life Against Death*--in Fromm's own words and
clinical experience---(the chapter
is called "Love of Death and Love of Life")  in which he writes: "the
affinity between the necrophilous contempt for life
and the admiration for speed and all that is mechanical has become apparent
only in the last decades. Yet as early as
1909, it was seen and succinctly expressed by Marinetti in his I*nitial
Manifesto of Futurism......*
and then goes on to write out the eleven well-expressed ideas....starting
with #1 We shall sing the love of danger, the habit of
energy and boldness. .....

He contrasts Marinetti with the "deeply biophilous interpretation of
technique and industry in Walt Whitman's poems"....
"Whitman could not have expressed his opposition to necrophilia better than
in this line..."to pass on (oh living, always living)
and leave the corpses behind."