Language

[Juan Cires Martinez]

Curiously, I was just reading Susan Sontag's "On Photography" while
thinking about the recent discussions on this list, and this popped out
of the "Melancholy Objects" chapter:

   The American landscape has always seemed too varied, immense,
   mysterious, fugitive to lend itself to scientism.  "He doesn't
   *know*, he can't *say*, before the facts," Henry James wrote in "The
   American Scene" (1907),

      and he doesn't even want to know or to say; the facts themselves
      loom, before the understanding, in too large a mass for a mere
      mouthful: it is as if the syllables were too numerous to make a
      legible word.  The *il*legible word, accordingly, the great
      inscrutable answer to questions, hangs in the vast American sky,
      to his imagination, as something fantastic and *abracadabrant*,
      belonging to no known language, and it is under this convenient
      ensign that he travels and considers and contemplates, and, to the
      best of his ability, enjoys.

   Americans feel the reality of their country to be so stupendous, and
   mutable, that it would be the rankest presumption to approach it in a
   classifying, scientific way.  One could get at it indirectly, by
   subterfuge -- breaking it off into strange fragments that could
   somehow, by synecdoche, be taken for the whole.

The resonances with Pynchon's style are obvious, I think, and I also
think that it hints at the possibility of escaping the language's
limitations.  It seems, to me, that this type of approach shifts the
focus of what is being said by a work from the work itself and to the
reader or spectator.  I wouldn't put much emphasis on Pynchon's
portrayal of Crutchfield, for example, -- which, in my reading, is
inside Slothrop's dream -- but on the whole picture emerging from the
book, a picture only hinted at by the words, phrases, descriptions,
actions, and characters that appear in it.

I'm not very sure I'm making any sense.

Saludos, Juan.

PS: In case it is not obvious already, I'm not a literary guy either.
I'm just trying to get my robot to dance.

PPS: I have not finished this chapter, which is centered arround how
photography is "the art that has managed to carry out the grandiose,
century-old threats of a Surrealist takeover of the modern sensibility."
The example of a scientific, classifying approach mentioned in contrast 
to american's approaches is August Sander's photographic catalogue of 
the German people.