Song For The Luddites Analysis

Luddism
Where Pynchon ends his essay “Is It OK To Be A Luddite?” I will begin: with the first paragraph of Lord Byron’s “Song for the Luddites”, which indicates the poet’s sympathy for them. As the Liberty lads o'er the sea Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood, So we, boys, we Will die fighting, or live free, And down with all kings but King Ludd! (qtd. in “Is It OK To Be A Luddite?”, 6)
Luddites “were bands of men, organized, masked, anonymous, whose object was to destroy machinery used mostly in the textile industry” (1) in the early nineteenth century with the fictitious King Ludd as their “more-than-human” leader. Luddites were, therefore, regarded as the “counterrevolutionaries” of the “Industrial Revolution”. The technology they targeted was the stocking frame that was invented by William Lee in 1589. So, this “was not a new piece of technology” (2). As a result, Pynchon saw Luddites not as anti-technological but anti-capitalist (Jarvis). Luddites were concerned with “the concentration of capital that each machine represented, and … the

In this sense, he praises Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as “the first and among the best” Luddite novel. Pynchon depicts Frankenstein as the “literary Badass,” the “Bad and Big” (3). Frankenstein was a creation combining biological and mechanical adaptations of the human being, which corresponds with the reality of communicating with the assistance of computers and technology. It is self-explanatory that such technological advances, which can turn man into computer, lead to “ethical, philosophical and political dilemma’s” (Colatrella 555). Furthermore, Pynchon compares Shelley with Walpole who, according to Pynchon, wrote “the first Gothic novel” (3). This type of novel was a response to the void left by Enlightenment, the Age of Reason and a yearning for the Age of