Starts with Leggo my Pomo and drifts a bit

[Gary L. Thompson]

On Sat, 24 May 1997, still lookin 4 the face i had b4 the world was made wrote:
[voluminous snip here]

> Q:  If a thing cannot be concretely defined, does that mean it is merely an
> illusory construction?  Or might it exist in some perpetually indefinable
> way?

I think Herr Goedel comes in about here (to bring us a little closer to 
Pynchon): that is, if my non-mathematical, not very logical 
recollection goes right, for any attempt at an airtight, rigorous, 
self-contained system, there _must_ be some set of statements which are 
neither true nor false, i.e., indefinable. There's some quantity of 
"black matter" that we can't wedge into our systems.

Thought that might be relevant to that one question in this interesting 
exchange. 

Probably there should be a shift along lines of "feminisms" years back, 
and we should be talking about postmodernism_s_. 

There's a parallel discussion going on at the H-Rhetor list, probably 
sparked by the same newspaper articles fed by the same "bad writing" 
contest. In that exchange, it's being pointed out that those doing such 
contests have a pretty clear attack in their choice of examples: that is, 
it's OK to use technical terms if you're doing high-energy physics or 
brain surgery, but not literary theory because good literature ought to 
be accessible to all of humanity (etc.). If taken far enough, this bends 
back on the "difficulty" thread as well. 

But one of the things that should be recognized is that there's a certain 
component of _fun_ in some pomo writing (prob. not Jameson): there's a 
component of devilment in tossing those abstractions around and getting 
the goat(s) of those believers in the Seriousness Of It All. These things 
come into _Gravity's Rainbow_ as an outburst of fun: just as Enzian is being 
Sold, On, Suicide, those little songs come in and the impulse to construct a 
complete list of things being renounced shows itself, and he has to put 
off the suicide of the title indefinitely . . . Pynchon's intent on 
finding the high magic to low puns, on mixing verbal universes that run 
from Heisenberg to Burroughs, mathematics to cinema, and constructing 
texts which are indefinitely surprising and, in the literal sense of the 
word, wonderful. (I'm taking my time through _M&D_, in order to savor 
its own version of wonder.)


Gary Thompson
Saginaw Valley State University

"No matter how cynical I get, I just can't keep up."
				--Lily Tomlin