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Sorry for the delay--my list reader needed updating.

>Posted on 9 Aug 1994 at 06:31:25 by Andrew Dinn
>Sorry to butt in on a debate I missed the start of (our network was
>down for a few days) but I really dislike this picture of the author
>as a pilot leading his/her readers. I mean even if someone produces a
>map and hands you a compass that doesn't mean you automatically start
>walking, does it.

Well, I, for one, don't presume to begin with Chapter 5, jump to Chapter
12, then back to Chapter 1.  And I must always resist the temptation to
read the last page.  There are hypertexts that are *intended* to be read
this way, but print books are constructed to be read front to back, even
for highly nonlinear narratives.  I think a good metaphor might be that
of putting together a jigsaw puzzle, but rather than getting the whole
box and dumping the pieces out on the table, the writer (intimately
familiar with the finished picture) hands you the pieces one by one,
in an order which will (hopefully) provide the most aesthetic revalation
of the picture as a whole.

In this sense the writer is very much in controll, acting as pilot/tour
guide.  Of reader and text, who is master and who is slave?  I enjoy
the roller-coaster feeling I get from reading Pynchon, the feeling that
I have no controll over where I'm going next.

>Posted on 8 Aug 1994 at 13:46:37 by LARSSON at VAX1.Mankato.MSUS.EDU
>a master of the comma.  Read in phrases, go with the flow of the language

I was wondering if others find Pynchon's use (or lack) of commas (and other
structural artifacts) to be particularly jarring in his earlier work?
(I'm thinking particulalry of some of the _Slow Learner_ stories and _V_.)

--
 -nathan marsh
 -st201026 at brownvm.brown.edu