Lit. Exhaust,etc.

[Alan Westrope]

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On Thu, 13 Jul 1995, <LARSSON at vax1.mankato.msus.edu> wrote:

> Barth in his original article especially singles out for mention Nabokov and
> Borges.  Part of his point, as I recall it, was that exhaustion gave writers
> a certain freedom, allowing them to have *fun* with their material (something
> Barth himself indulges in with glee).  Years later, though (c. 1980), he
> wrote another essay titled "The Literature of Replenishment," suggesting
> that Postmodernism had regained its footing and was now shooting for something
> more substantial--I don't remember whether he actually cited TRP in that
> case.

> I used to have both articles (originally from ATLANTIC MONTHLY) at hand, but
> the elves have made off with them.

Both are included in Barth's _The Friday Book_ [1984!], along with many
other delightful essays.  Curiously, I swear this text of "The Literature
of Exhaustion" differs slightly from my long-lost photocopy of the original
ATLANTIC article, which is exactly what happens whenever Barth rereads Borges'
"Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," according to the article...or mebbe it vuz zat
_Jimsom Veed_ I vuz eating back then...dunno about Barth, though...

It's worth glancing through the book to read Barth's reflections about
how the essay "has been frequently reprinted and as frequently misread."

Also, I want to thank the person -- sorry, don't recall the name -- who
mentioned the book on this list a while ago in reference to Barth's essay,
"Don't Count on It:  A Note on the Number of the 1001 Nights."  Like Barth,
I love the _1001 Nights_, but I had no idea those twin cyphers, surrounded
bookendishly by twin Unities, were so, uh...pregnant with meaning. :-)

Barth has a new book, _Furthur Fridays_, that includes essays on the
use of self-similarity, fractals, chaos theory, etc., in postmodern
literature.  I haven't seen it yet, but I suspect some here will be
interested.

While I'm fracbabbling, I don't belive I've seen it mentioned here that
one chapter of Vineland begins, "The shape of the brief but legendary
Trasero County coast...repeated on its own scale the greater curve
between San Diego and Terminal Island," which is perhaps an allusion
to Mandelbrot's ruminations about the coastline of Britain.  I wonder
if Pynchon and/or Mandelbrot ever read Josiah Royce's _The World and the
Individual_ [1899], which contains the following:

"Let us imagine that a portion of the soil of England has been leveled
off perfectly and that on it a cartographer traces a map of England.
The job is perfect; there is no detail of the soil of England, no matter
how minute, that is not registered on the map; everything there has its
correspondence.  This map, in such a case, should contain a map of the
map, which should contain a map of the map of the map, and so on to
infinity."

ps -- How the hell do you pronounce imipolex, anyway?

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Alan Westrope                  <awestrop at nyx10.cs.du.edu>
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