Georgios Maragos (Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens)
In Against the Day, an ingenious contraption is able to glance at the past, present, and future of a person just by analyzing a photograph. In Vineland a movie camera is considered a weapon, but fails, in a particularly pynchonesque manner, to become useful in the hands of those who tried to oppose the system.
There may be twenty years of creativity between these two works, but there is also an entire century of technological advancement, which revolutionized not only the way reality is documented, but also how it is perceived. Light-capturing technologies have had their own particular significance in this course and Thomas Pynchon has tried to implement it in his novels, which (Mason & Dixon aside) run through the whole of the 20th century. Assuming – and a quick examination of his themes and motifs from Slow Learner to Inherent Vice tells us there is no reason not to – that (not necessarily Pynchon’s views but) his obsessions have remained relatively the same from the moment he started writing until today, then it is possible to follow the evolution of these technologies through the eyes of the American author in an order not of creation but of existence in historical time.
For Thomas Pynchon a technology, be it real or imaginary or in that limbo-like realm of science fiction, always starts as something magical or even mystical, but it then becomes inherent in the nature of man, both forming him and being formed by him. This is how the existence of a future-telling machine can be explained in Against the Day or why a church is transformed into a cinema. However, light is sinister in this novel and the technology of storing it cannot escape this fate. It is in Gravity’s Rainbow where this becomes obvious, since Thomas Pynchon parallelizes cinema with the rocket and ends up by fusing them in a glorious word-explosion at the end.
It is television which marks the point where the moving image becomes a part of what constitutes reality, beyond the point of simply influencing or even forming it. In V., where cyborgs play an important role, the only actual cybernetic organism is the person who has connected his nervous system with the TV, so that it turns off when he falls asleep. In The Crying of Lot 49, an actor, a lawyer, a badly cut movie that is playing on TV and a dubious reality which merges with the program give us a glimpse of what is to follow. But it is in Inherent Vice and Vineland, where the tube, as Pynchon likes to call it, becomes an integral part of his heroes’ lives. In the former, the tube is another drug to use, a method not to alter reality but to create an alternate version, equally – if not more – plausible. This concept finds its culmination in the episode where a few kilos of heroin become a compelling television program. The tube doesn’t even need to be present in the scene to become a factor of creating reality. There is a similar situation in Vineland, only there is a faint glimpse of hope in it. The movie camera passes from the hands of unidentified content creators to the hands of the rebels or the preterites as Gravity’s Rainbow would call them. But the hope is only fleeting in Reaganite America and what is conceived to be a weapon that can even be used to murder people quickly fades in front of the raw power of the state. Reality is not for the rebels to form.
It is these issues that I will try to trace in this presentation. While the Marxist approach cannot be ignored, and especially Fredric Jameson’s reading of Adorno’s culture industry and its relation with modern day entertainment politics, it would be interesting to view the light-capturing technologies for what they are and what they are capable of without an anonymous “They” behind them. There is a lot of theory to draw from in this field: from the inevitable McLuhan and Baudrillard, where reality simply disappears to leave its place to its simulation, to the rarer Niklas Luhmann and the constructivists, where the media form their own reality in order to sustain their existence, carrying us away with them. Analysis of politics and power in relation to media will remain, however, within the goals of this presentation, albeit secondary ones.