Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
coal-tar.) Jamf is Pynchon's Faust figure, whom he explicitly links in the
novel to the character of Rothwang in Fritz Lang's
Metropolis
, and to
Lang's diabolical Dr Mabuse, a psychologist who seeks world domina-
tion. Like the archetypically mad scientist, Jamf wants to cross forbidden
boundaries, to blur the distinction between the living and the lifeless.
And characteristically, Pynchon's chemistry borders on the sinisterly
plausible:
'Silicon, boron, phosphorus [says Jamf] - these can replace carbon, and
can bond to nitrogen instead of hydrogen […] move beyond life, towards
the inorganic. Here there is no frailty, no mortality - here is Strength,
and the Timeless.' Then in his well-known finale, as he wiped away the
scrawled C-H on his chalkboard and wrote, in enormous letters, Si-N.
[Pynchon 1995, p. 580]
Which of course spells out also: sin.
In tracing the origins of Imipolex G, Pynchon takes us deep into the
early history of polymer science. The material is, he says,
traceable back to early research done at du Pont. Plasticity has its grand
tradition and main stream, which happens to flow by way of du Pont and
their famous employee Carothers, known as the Great Synthesist. His
classic study of large molecules spanned the decade of the twenties and
brought us directly to nylon, which not only is a delight to the fetishist
and a convenience to the armed insurgent, but was also, at the time and
well within the System, an announcement of Plasticity's central canon:
that chemists were no longer to be at the mercy of Nature. They could
decide now what properties they wanted a molecule to have, and then go
ahead and build it. At du Pont, the next step after nylon was to introduce
aromatic rings into the polyamide chain. Pretty soon a whole family of
'aromatic polymers' had arisen: aromatic polyamides, polycarbonates,
polyethers, polysulfanes. [Pynchon 1995, p. 249f.]
Notice again this listing of names that will mean nothing to the average
reader: a list that serves to say '
You
might not have a clue what these
things are, but someone else does, and that's why they have more power
than you do.' And to rub this point in, Pynchon describes Jamf's chem-
ical accomplishments in terms technical enough to suggest that again
there is an intellect behind all of this that far exceeds the poor reader's:
