Less Is More. Again. And Again.

[m1nmw00 at FRB.GOV]

Just a few thoughts that I haven't fully worked out yet.

  OUTRSPACIA at aol.com observed:
> It seems that most of the conversation took the side that TRP was writing on
> the MORE side of this equation.

> I rather think that he's writing on the LESS side. Afterall, I see Gravity's
> Rainbow as a hologram (the whole suggested by a fragment), a condensation, a
> skimming of the surface of a host of subjects. It's like a randomly ordered
> encyclopedia, not the unaBRIDGED (rainbow) version. Read the book and you are
> forced to look elsewhere for MORE information. [...]

I have to agree, and I think that the same holds for others who were placed
on the "MORE" side of the fence, i.e. Joyce.  Try unpacking Finnegans
Wake, and you'll see just how dense it is.  And talk about being forced to
look elsewhere for more information or explanation...

But perhaps the original point was concerned not so much with the density
of the informational matter, but rather with the style of prose.  In that
case perhaps Pynchon could be contrasted with, say, Hemingway, but I'll leave
that as a suggestion.  

Or perhaps we should put aside the less/more opposition as too simplistic. 
To go back to Joyce, at times he seems to be a "maximalist" (including
Bloom's budget in Ulysses), but at other times a "minimalist" (a wonderfully
compact phrase like "Me. And me now." also in Ulysses).  Joyce uses both
explication and implication to great effect and so, perhaps, does Pynchon.

--Noah Williams (m1nmw00 at frb.gov)