Today, I re-read The Crying of Lot 49. This time around, the reading was for the technoculture studies class, which starts in less than two weeks. (Yikes!)
In Pynchon’s novel there is, of course, this wonderful line: “‘A sign,’ he whispered, ‘is what it is’” (115). That line—and that muted post horn, for which CoL 49 is so well-known—emerge, in part, because of a computer, which looks a bit like so:
The IBM 7094 (tho the above photo is of a 7090 console, the 7094′s predecessor).
As the CoL 49 story goes, in the 1960′s, an executive at Yoyodyne (a large manufacturing plant in the aerospace industry) is replaced by a 7094. Or, to be more precise, an “efficiency expert” determines that said executive should be replaced by a 7094. Important, and not explicitly mentioned in the novel, is the fact that the 7094 is famous for helping make compatible time-sharing systems possible. (It was also the first computer to sing, thereby inspiring a scene from Kubrick’s 2001. I digress.)
Replaced by a computer and rendered useless by the new phenomenon of time-sharing, the executive decides to commit suicide by dousing himself (including his tie) in gasoline and lighting himself on fire. But the drama is interrupted when two people enter the front door: “It was his wife and some man, whom he soon recognized as the very efficiency expert at Yoyodyne who had caused him to be replaced by an IBM 7094″ (115).
What happens next is—in its balance of humor and tragedy—typical Pynchon:
He took his tie out of the gasoline and started to snigger. He closed the top on his Zippo. “I hear laughing,” his wife said presently. “I smell gasoline,” said the efficiency expert. Hand in hand, naked, the two proceeded to the kitchen. “I was about to do the Buddhist monk thing,” explained the executive. “Nearly three weeks it takes him,” marvelled the efficiency expert, “to decide. You know how long it would’ve taken the IBM 7094? Twelve microseconds. No wonder you were replaced.” (115)
From that point forward, with the muted post horn as his sign, as his emblem for silence and disaffectedness, the executive swears off love. Not only that, but he also starts a society of isolates, who help him—alone, but networked—spread that swearing off.
This scene is intriguing to me for a number of reasons, the first of which is how it contextualizes and refigures perceptions of time and space in the U.S, in the 1960s, in an age of mainframe computing. Here, we could get quintessentially postmodern with the symptoms: the waning of affect, alienation (despite contiguous relations), and life in the grid (or, as Pynchon writes later in the novel, “walking among matrices of a great digital computer” (181)). As the executive observes from the kitchen of his home, “the efficiency expert wished to have sexual intercourse with the wife on the Moroccan rug in the living room. The wife was not unwilling” (115). Playing both “the voyeur and listener” (123) and not the active participant (much like Oedipa Maas throughout most of the novel), the executive is able to share an intimate moment in a strikingly detached fashion. What’s more, if we read computers and other technologies as inherently gendered, then it’s difficult to deny how the executive’s wife is objectified (e.g., “the wife”) in this scene as a means of both communication and pleasure. She becomes a shared node for exchange between the executive and the efficiency expert.
Another reason is perhaps less obvious: memory. Later in the novel, Pynchon describes a used mattress as being “like the memory bank to a computer of the lost” (126). (Despite my general dislike of similes, this one is fantastic.) What happens, then, when the memory bank is erased, when it is gone without a trace, when it and what it stored cannot be recovered? Here might be a productive distinction between analog consciousness and digital memory. For, in his swearing off of love, the executive has to willfully erase his past, without committing suicide. Forgetting is a Nietzschean for-getting. It is active and repeated. To be a tad reductive, the act of erasing something from a computer does not demand such willful activity and repetition. I can send something to the recycle bin, perhaps sit on it for some time, and ultimately empty that bin. That said, it is, of course, arguable that CoL 49, with all of its references to seizures, forgetting, and arrests, is stressing how a new U.S. technoculture may be linked to new (posthuman?) forms of consciousness and memory, perhaps more akin to computation and things digital than to the spectra of the analog. However, what raises the level of critical engagement is this question: How are these new forms a part of world-making, too? That is, how does world-making, if at all, require the “swearing off” of the past, and, in that process, what differences between digital erasure and analog forgetting manifest?
My last reason is less heady. It’s actually a fun fact for coders who love computing trivia. In his personal history of the 7094, “The IBM 7094 and CTSS,” Tom Van Vleck points out that:
One change was to use the extra index registers that the 7094 had and the 7090 didn’t. And buried deep in the code, there was the line of code
SXA VR16,1 ‘SOMEBODY HAS TO SAVE IT’ SAYS BOB CRABTREE
Noel Morris and I created the Bob Crabtree Society, open to people who knew where that comment was and what it did.
Elsewhere, post-CoL 49, in “Is It OK to be a Luddite,” Pynchon, aside from his reading of Frankenstein, writes:
The word “Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D.D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time.
Less possible by the day, indeed. Nonetheless, you call me a utopian believer in W.A.S.T.E. and the Bob Crabtree Society. I need something to save me from getting lost, and I still get a kick out of tactical acts of code-foolery. After all, sometimes they add up.
Work Cited:
Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: Perennial Library, 1990.
This coming week (from May 20th to the 23rd), I’ll be attending my third Computers and Writing conference, this year at Purdue University. (The last two I attended were at Wayne State and UC-Davis.)
