IPW 2010

Petrus van Ewijk (University of Antwerp)

During his attempt to track down his ex-girlfriend Shasta Fay, Larry “Doc” Sportello calls upon the help of a former colleague, the skip-tracer Fritz Drybeam. In Drybeam’s office, Sportello is confronted with “computer cabinets, consoles with lit-up video screens, and alphanumerical keyboards, and cables running all over the floor among unswept drifts of little bug-size rectangles punched out of IBM cards” (IV 53). When Drybeam explains his set-up as part of the ARPAnet, Sportello reacts: “Ah, no I’d better not, I’ve got to drive and stuff, maybe just give me one for later-“ (IV 53). Doc’s reaction connects the internet with notions of intoxication, addiction and by extension, isolation. It also conjures up the suggestion that Drybeam might very well be the first internet-addict ever, giving a humorous twist to Doc’s remark about Fritz’s brain being “all dialed in” (53). Set in the final moments of the Sixties, Inherent Vice marks the transition from the era of hope and togetherness to a future of corporate greed and narcissism. The presence of the ARPAnet in the novel foreshadows the growing importance of networks in our current society, as well as the shift from the notion of power based on confinement, discipline and normativity, to the idea of control in which modulation, distribution and flexibility have become crucial. Pynchon comments upon the accompanying danger of this shift in the introduction to Jim Dodge’s Stone Junction: “The question had only begun to arise of how to avoid, or, preferably, escape altogether, the threat, indeed promise, of control without mercy that lay in wait down the comely vistas of freedom that computer-folk were imagining then” (Stone Junction). This control without mercy, Pynchon ironically defines as necessary “to catch those Drug Dealers of course, nothing to do with the grim, simplex desire for more information, more control, lying at the heart of most exertions of power, whatever governmental or corporate (if that’s a distinction you believe in)” (Stone Junction).

In Inherent Vice, ARPAnet is connected to the Ramo Woolridge Corporation (54). From 1954, their main business was to act as the principal advisor to the Air Force for the US intercontinental ballistic missile program, which was founded on the German V2 program. This seems to suggest that Pynchon had to have been aware of the existence of ARPAnet when he was writing Gravity’s Rainbow. Moreover, Pynchon’s knowledge of Norbert Wiener’s work makes it likely that he also knew of Wiener’s close colleague, Claude Shannon, who was one of the founders of modern telecommunications and the ARPAnet. My paper will investigate the importance of the ARPAnet in Inherent Vice and the connections that can be made with Gravity’s Rainbow. It will devote specific attention to the passages in Inherent Vice concerning Riggs Warbley’s “zomes” or zonahedral domes, which were first introduced by the mathematician Steve Baer. He experimented with these peculiar architectural constructions in the early 1960s in New Mexico. Both the term “zome” as well as its peculiar structure are also highly reminiscent of the rhizome, proposed by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus. This rhizome counts as the ideal – though unattainable – form of a network, in which, as Umberto Eco has it, “every point can be connected with every other point” (81). Following Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, I will point out how Inherent Vice marks the end of an arc that Pynchon started in Gravity’s Rainbow and that describes the transformation of the old power hubs, represented in Gravity’s Rainbow as “Them,” into control groups that now wield the versatility of networks to ensure their power. As such they contribute to the ongoing isolation of the individual, to which Pynchon alludes in the final chapter of Inherent Vice.

Works Cited: