Pynchon and History by Smith Shawn;

Author:Smith, Shawn; [Smith, Shawn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1543027
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group

The poetics of this passage fulfill Frenesi’s earlier vision of human beings as “digits in God’s computer.” This passage’s millions of ones and zeros encode “patterns of life and death,” Pynchon’s metaphor for the lives captured by the “memory bank” of computerized history. The complexity and magnitude of this code is hyperspace’s replication of the physical world. Moreover, hyperspace’s binary codes fulfill Pynchon’s earlier “God-as-computer” metaphor: they order and control time and space as if they were God. It is especially significant that these codes manipulate time. Still photography is a temporally static mode of visual reproduction. The picture of D.L. and Frenesi suspends them in time. Yet the computer animates this picture: the subsequent episode is actually a digitized simulation of D.L. and Frenesi’s “real” past, as imagined and executed by the computer itself. Narrated in this way, the lives and deaths to which the computer’s binary codes allude are not just human; the metaphor also encompasses history and historical time. These codes at once simulate the past, the human beings who experience it, and the spatial reality they once inhabited. Temporal and spatial depth and ground vanish into the microchip. As such, this episode traces the impact of visual culture on the world of Vineland from the past (film), through the present (television), and onward toward its future (computerized digital imaging). There is an implicit historicity in this progression that corresponds with the “death of history” in postmodern America.

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