ABSTRACT
Tony Tanner's monograph on Thomas Pynchon places cybernetics and information at the center of the Pynchon mythography. This chapter discusses the extent of cybernetic theme in Pynchon's works, and analyzes several effective metaphors from each of Pynchon's various novels. Pynchon's fictions employ machinery to expose the very un-machine-like machinery of the reader's consciousness at work. If Pynchon's fictions have an ultimate meaning it is the level of cognitive mechanism, where his fictions – especially his metaphors – push certain cortical buttons incarnate within us. The desire-machine is a servo-mechanism, summed by a calculus of desires we call "society," which in turn creates structures of differentiation, systems of knowing and believing, in order to mask the crisis at its center, crisis of undifferentiation, violence, and chaos. Rene Girard writes: "There is a unity that underlies not only all mythologies and rituals, but the whole of human culture, and this unity of unities depends on single mechanism, continually functioning because perpetually misunderstood".
