The Crying of Lot 49. Group Read 2024

[Joseph Tracy]

Interesting thoughts for me up to the weird idea that a nation would be any better at shaping a self than a private individual process. My feeling is that nations have proved too big and warlike and individuals have proved to small and malleable to inauthentic values and connections. I got a book by Jacque Ellul, whose ideas sounded  interestingly contrarian. The book is the Technological System and I was surprised at  how unimpressed I was. He puts the technological system developed by what he calls The West as positively driven by individualism as opposed to what he calls collectivism which is an industrial rather than technological model. The definitions and distinctions seem self serving and dishonest , and only touch on moral questions where he has a religious issue. He spends an enormous amount of time on definitions and his efforts seem riddled with obvious flaws. His ideas are not deeply affirming, visionary or contrarian in such a way as to differ dramatically from the results we see. Cheap fossil fuel energy is unmentioned as the core driving resource of western notions of technology and that is just unacceptably narrow and cultural as opposed to a realistic understanding of how technology has worked historically and its current negative consequences for life forms  dependent on their  biological context.

My own feeling is that Pynchon is descriptive rather than prescriptive in weighing these things. The villains are as much addicts whose poisons are self destructive as  they are successful managers of the levers of power: inherited wealth, real estate, ruthless employment practices , extractive technologies, etc. The search for  meaning by individuals is always a kind of war against a rising tide, but that struggle  can lead to an authentic self if also a humanly flawed self. The visionary insights of great minds of science are applied in ways opposite to their intent. There is a what goes up must come down kind of karmic common sense ( cosmic comic sense?) that prevails.

Is there in P’s world an antidote for the self destructive madness of violent competition for control and dominance? I don’t know. There is local  cooperative spirit that also informs his more likable  characters. They are far less connected to big ideas or organizing polities, and the best aspect of their anarchist tendencies is this egalitarian local friendliness and affinity. Could that cooperative and self reflective  mindset become an alternative basis for a large enough scale as a social model to offer a new and compelling alternative to nuclear brinksmanship and ecological catastrophe? 
    

> On Jul 9, 2024, at 2:31 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> More relevance to some themes, I hope.
> 
> I spoke of reading a book that I thought had perspective,
> very relevant stuff to show insight into Pynchon's novella...
> to bring a certain slant of light onto P's genius. Which perspective
> he had in 1965!   Since these books mentioned are all much later, yet
> the prompting phrase and much intellectual ruminating goes way back
> to discussions of modernity: "Round about 1910, human nature changed"---V.
> Woolf
> 
> The book I was referring to was *The Ethics of Authenticity *by Charles
> Taylor, google him, I'm gonna read more of him. The book is from 1991.
> 
> Here is his thrust (and I hope I do not kill his meaning with a
> reductionist oversimplification.)
> 
> This: the modern world has lost its enchantment. (This, in a famous quote
> from Weber, a Pynchon fave, we know).
> That enchantment held all of us in a spiritual/religious chain of being, so
> to speak. [See The Great Chain of Being book or concept]
> Wherein we were all connected beyond our {puny) selves. That great chain
> bound us in communities of all kinds. Basic earthbound
> communities as well as others. In which we defined ourselves. ( PS, this
> organic community concept is what I would argue is Morris's
> fingering of Pynchon's Garden of Eden nostalgia, but in history not myth. P
> shows and says so in *Against the Day, imo. *And it is in another P fave,
> Henry Adams*)*
> 
> Losing that connection in modernity, we are thrown back on our
> individualism. THAT is the problem Taylor tackles.
> Such individualism, he sez is psychologically grounded in nothing beyond
> itself, (as the word kinda implies. I have ordered his* Sources of the
> Self)*)
> Such individualism is self-grounded, kind of like Morris's loop analogously
> and therefore is wholesale pervasive narcissism. --(He uses others here; he
> says this is seen everywhere by some, such as Lasch in his book The Culture
> of Narcissism. Which I read but while not fully "woke", so am looking at
> again) The whole rootless culture echoes it--allusion to Echo Court
> intended. This reflection tower is everywhere, is also a mirror.   Seeing
> the men wanting Oedipa can be seeing full-blown narcissism in all of them.
> (Oedipa not feeling any sexual relevance in her situation may be a way of
> saying she ISN'T narcissistic anymore.)
> 
> All of the religious-like signs Oedipa sees that are signs that do not lead
> to religion as known are like the disenchantment of the--her--world. (This,
> from Weber, seems very likely to me as part of Pynchon's intent.)
> 
> Taylor works hard in the rest of his book to show how individualism can
> overcome itself, he thinks.....(an authentic connection to the polity of
> one's
> country is one way---Taylor is Canadian and near the end he contrasts his
> Canadian readers with "the country just south of us" )
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>