GRGR(4) Cherokee

[keith woodward]

max:
>> This is his "Strategy of
>>Transfer" that he speaks of in the intro to Slow Learner.
>
Doug:
>Maybe this technique is part of what TRP offers that is new as a novelist
>(I'm not talking about the content of his book, but about his technique)?
>I'm probably forgetting something very obvious, but can anybody else think
>of a novel of this stature in which readers are repeatedly, and explicitly,
>directed to go to other books to fill in the blanks?

*Ulysses*, *Finnegans Wake*,...

The technique is very characteristic of the encyclopedic novel (if not
*the* characteristic of it).  I think there's ample room for political
conclusions to be drawn from this strategy.  The strategy also functions as
an aesthetic device for layering the text and in that sense is akin to
allusion, name-dropping, &c. that allow numerous contexts to be informing
the text from under it's surface and from outside of itself at once.  It
seems to me that it falls undcer this larger categorization, and rightly
so, because this sort of encyclopedic extra-textuality is the literary
equivalent to invisible forces being at work in the real world: texts that
inform GR from outside might be said to hold some power with regard to
interpretive strategies (and yet the text does not actually exist as
itselkf within GR).  P's attraction to it is understandable.

Keith W