It is appropriate to discuss the reminiscence of the past in an era that moves towards an unknown future and whose memories are increasingly banished in the kingdom of nostalgia. or, even worse, obsolete. Thomas Pynchon and William Faulkner, in sharply contrasting ways, explore the ways in which we, as individuals and communities, remember, recycle, and renovate the past. Retrospection is inevitable in their works, because the past is unavoidable and defines, even dominates, the present. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”?Get the original essayPynchon maintains an optimistic, Ovidian view of the past: we recycle our cultural memories in another, perhaps better, form. The resulting disordered cultural spectrum, filled as much by the glut of contemporary television channels as by 17th-century revenge dramas, is organized by a principle of supervision. Just as the postal system orders geography into zip codes and specific areas, Maxwell's Demon in The Crying of Lot 49 "connects the world of thermodynamics to the world of information flow" (106); it applies a controlled scientific objective to the aesthetic and sprawling subjective. But Pynchon's culture is not a culture haunted by ghosts, except those of Hamlet and Scooby-Doo. Faulkner's landscape is tortured by the tragedy of the South. According to him, the earth is cursed because of two presumptions of the white man: that he could possess other men and that he could possess the earth. Focusing on the microcosm of the fallen Compson family, Faulkner details how various family members grapple with past losses and how they confront their searing memories. In what canonized The Sound and the Fury, Faulkner also recreates the Compsons' temporal confusion in the narrative, through a non-sequential timeline and through sentences that combine past, present, and future tenses. Despite the professional differences between the two authors, they share a surprising wealth of concerns, notably that of order from chaos. Pynchon's order, however, remains fertile in universality and coherence, while Faulkner maintains that there is no real way of ordering memory, that each event is singular (in fact, he wanted the different eras of the novel are printed in corresponding colors), and this loss permeates the present despite attempts to reevaluate or separate from the past. The first sentence of Lot 49's cries introduces "Mrs. Oedipa Maas" (9). Her name immediately and powerfully evokes for the reader all the cultural baggage associated with the name Oedipa. It is of course the Latin feminine of Oedipus, the tragic Greek hero destined to murder his father and sleep with his mother. However, the female version of Oedipus is not Oedipus, but Electra. The obvious Freudian associations tempt the reader into (most likely unnecessary) psychoanalytic reading. Its name is not so much about psychological complexes as it is about language and how language can act on the character. Oedipa also has "pa" in the name, but it is directly followed by the "Ma" in Maas. Additionally, the initials of “Mrs. Oedipa Mass” mean “MOM.” Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the nickname her husband gives her is "Oed", or the abbreviations from the Oxford English Dictionary. This is what Oedipa is, a dictionary of various etymologies whose roots we discover. Postmodernism often removes traditional characterization at the expense of names because of all that the name can offer us through its etymological past. There is nothing sinisterin this recycling; it is simply a mode of cultural consciousness, a way of recycling the chaotic past into a kind of organized present. Faulkner's names carry with them the literal and figurative pronunciations of their ancestors. Consider the following exchange in Benjy's memory: Your name is Benjy, Caddy said. Do you hear. Benjy. Benjy. Don't tell him that, said Mother. Bring him here. Caddy picked me up under my arms. Get up, Mau – I mean Benjy, she said. (39) Benjy was called Maury, after his uncle but, as Faulkner tells us in the index, "when at last even his mother realized what he was and tearfully insisted that his name be changed, she was renamed Benjamin" (213). Rebaptizing is a euphemism for what many Compsons attempt in vain, the purging of their dark past in the hope of a second chance at baptism. But he's not even Benjamin anymore; it seems too adult a name for his childish status. This isn't the only case of disastrous name choices. Caddy names her daughter after her brother, Quentin. Jason, tormented both by his sister, for running away and promiscuity, and by his brother, for running away to Harvard and the resulting financial harm to the family (and preventing Jason from going to college) , treats the female Caddy like her mother's daughter, with cruelty and barbarity. Compensating for the losses that his mother and Quentin have taken from him, he creates a loss for him by defrauding him of the money that his mother sends him (a tangible inheritance) and by forbidding any contact between the two (a more emotional inheritance). Unlike Pynchon, Faulkner's name is weighed down, not polished, by memorial associations. Nonetheless, these associations are omnipresent in TCL49, with high and low cultural artifacts intertwining in a grand equation of cultural consciousness. For Pynchon, collective cultural memory recognizes little difference between a museum of abstract, intellectual art and experience stored on a dirty concrete mattress. Everything blurs into one, like one of the book's many catalogs of seemingly disparate items: ...cut-out coupons promising savings of 5 or 10 cents, trade stamps, pink flyers announcing special deals on the markets, butts, shy people. combs, tender announcements, yellow pages torn from the telephone directory, scraps of old underwear or dresses that were period costumes... all these bits and pieces coated evenly, like a salad of despair, d 'a gray bandage of ash, condensed exhaust gases, dust, bodily waste... (14) What a cut coupon and damaged underwear have in common is that they are both waste , that they are both “uniformly coated” with the markers of rot, that their common heritage is one of waste. In fact, the acronym WASTE runs throughout the novel, and not just for mystery effect. The acronym gives new meaning to a word (in this case, it stands for "We Await Silent Tristero's Empire"), infusing its letters with rich language while simultaneously obscuring its past incarnations into a single word. Similar meanings are grafted onto Mucho's radio station, KCUF (a reverse curse), and the CIA (not for the Central Intelligence Agency, but for Conjuración de los Insurgents Anarquistas). Indeed, the term “anarchist miracle” refers to a chaotic dance which does not burst into collisions but to what “an unthinkable order” permeates “a music, numerous rhythms, all the tones at once, a choreography in which each couple connects easily, predetermined” (131). Maxwell's Demon gives order to what seems indomitable, providing random elements of spatial organization of information, just as the postal system supervises the geographical spread of theCompany. This organization, which draws on the past to produce a new and orderly present, gives an optimistic air to cultural recycling, as evidenced by the tasty dandelion wine and its more serious roots: "'...You see, in spring , when the dandelions begin to bloom again, the wine undergoes fermentation as if they were remembering” (98). Oedipa denies this meaning, but Pynchon implies that the world works this way, taking leftover waste and reformulating it as something useful, even consumable. The cultural residue in Faulkner is much more pessimistic in nature. Taken in conjunction with TS Eliot's "The Wasteland", The Sound and the Fury critiques the sterility of a non-ritualized modern society. Eliot's poem demonstrates the fear of rain, of a fertile land in which "April is the cruelest month" and "winter keeps us warm." The parched landscape offers refuge to the individual against the march of time (since fertility and seasonal rituals are abolished) and has settled over the South: the day has dawned, dark and cold, a moving wall of gray light coming from the northeast which, instead, rose. from dissolving in the dampness, seemed to disintegrate into tiny, venomous particles, like dust, which, when Dilsey opened the cabin door and stepped out, sank sideways into his flesh, precipitating less a dampness than a substance having the quality of a thin layer of moisture. , oil not completely set. (165) Only Dilsey's outsider status (at least from the Compson family), the quality that will make her and other blacks "endure," as Faulkner writes in the Appendix, transforms the dust of death in a somewhat liquid state. The novel's many losses—of family members, of innocence, of money, of land, of manhood (Benjy's castration)—are transformed into an overwhelming symptom of sterility, of a land stuck in the past and reluctant to commit to the future. Even the title comes from a phrase in "Macbeth," emphasizing not only the novel's tragic structure but also its associations with the high culture of the past (ironically, ambition, the most forward-looking of impulses, is the major theme of Shakespeare's work). play).With this nefarious past to work from, it's no wonder the Compson family has such difficulty extracting any good from their memory banks. Each of the three brothers' stories negotiates with the past in a different and equally destructive way. Benjy's story mixes all eras in a disordered and fragmented style. Incapable of distinguishing times, Benjy is reduced, as much as his developmental delay limits him, to a childish state of perception. What is the cause and what is the effect is negligible: seeing the world in a temporal blur is like seeing it as an infant. Quentin, on the other hand, perceives the past in a more logical way – but to the extreme. He's mired in the past, consumed by Caddy's loss of virginity, by the pasture that was sold to send him to Harvard, by his uncaring father, and by the little ticking of the hands on his watch. This Hamlet-like absorption in the past sends him to suicide, whereby he continually walks in his own mortal shadow. The losses of the past cancel out any sort of future for him and prove as unsuccessful a strategy as Benjy's time warp. Ultimately, Jason moves forward in life as if the past were nonexistent. However, he too cannot escape the memory and must face the legacy of Quentin and Caddy in the 17-year-old Caddy. The fact that he tries to hinder his promiscuity also suggests his aversion to a fertile future and traps Jason in the condensed milieu of the present, an unbearable present who cannot help but notice the fading past.