| However much they may differ in other respects, most notably in their contrasting public personalities, Mailer and Pynchon share this such: both writers seek to encompass technology within an inclusive imaginative structure. Mailer's conception in Of A fire on the Moon of a "Psychology of Machines," it is argued, derives from his own prior meditations of psychology, the dream, and the divided self. Manuscript evidence--a chapter that was written for A Fire, but then cut from the final draft-- suggests that Mailer intended a fictional development that was never realized within the narrative of the moon book. He has created a vast psychological fiction that extends through An American Dream and Why Are We in Vietnam? to Ancient Evenings, but he has yet to reconcile his own imaginative systems with the objects and methods of technology.;For Pynchon, as for Mailer, the dream is perhaps the primary vehicle through which technological imagery can be presented. But where Mailer's conception of the dream preceded A fire, and remained more or less unchanged by his engagement with technology, there is no such separation in Gravity's Rainbow. It is Pynchon's particular skill to locate the precise metaphorical possibilities within any technical image he treats. He uses the scientific idea of complementarity, for example, as a structuring principle of Gravity's Rainbow. Similarly, in the capsule biographies of the book's many scientists and engineers, he transforms the special language of science and engineering for his own fictive purposes. The result is as crucial to our cultural understanding of science and engineering as it is enriching to the language. |
