Erich Fromm and Pynchon

[David Morris]

Thanks. A very apt curation of themes and influences in GR!

On Fri, Jun 17, 2022 at 8:01 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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."
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>