The Great Divide

[Vaska]

Andrew Dinn wrote:
>Michael McAulay writes:
>> I've been looking for an opening for this for a while now...check page
>> 616 of M&D where there is a clear reference to G. Spencer-Brown's Laws
>> Of Form.  In LOF the fundamental operation of thought is identified as
>> drawing-a-line, which operation is explicitly identified with naming.
>
>Wow! Thanks for a beauty of a footnote.


I don't know the work of G. Spencer-Brown [which I will have to read now,
dammit], but what Michael McAuley has pointed out strikes me as far more
than mere footnote material.  

It links directly to Pynchon's [by now] life-long preoccupation with the
pitfalls opened up by the symbolizing faculty of the human animal -- a
preoccupation prominently displayed in both _V_ and _GR_.  Going totally out
on a limb now, my feeling is that, despite or perhaps along with all his
postmodern surfaces and depths, Pynchon has been moving steadily back
towards an almost classical Romantic position.  Which is a huge topic in its
own right, especially now that he's given us a novel whose attitude to the
Enlightenment seems ambivalent at best.

And with all those Pynchon conferences coming up, this DST thing is becoming
a real godsend, come to think of it. 

Vaska