GRGR4: Details, Details

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy:

I wonder if, in debating the finer points of doctrine as revealed in
the allusive incidents in the text, if, in defining and refining the
meaning of details we loose sight of their purpose.  The author is
engaged in the making of a Thing -- a charged, powerful text; a big
book -- and makes choices which further the larger aim.  The meaningful
details are there to support the whole; the whole is not a vehicle for
the delivery of the parts.  It is not a tool, like a Rocket.  IMO, the
Kenosha Kid Episode was not contrived as a means of introducing Nim
Chimpsky or symbolic Burma Shave Signs or "forbidden topic's" like
assasination, interracial buggery or harmonicas into the novel.  The
KKE episode provides data about a central character, and about the
forces arrayed against his well-being, of the uses to which he is put,
in furtherance of the story. (Such an unfashionable word, story.)

The details and allusions enrich the Whole, and are more or less
artfully wrought in themselves, but don't necessarily have to MEAN very
much beyond contributing to a creepy sense that the entire modern world
is present and accounted for and somehow enmeshed into the Structure of
the Whole.  GR is a fiction.  I am sure Pynchon hoped it would be an
entertainment.

GR == encylopedic text as WALL OF SOUND == very 60's.


Mark, courting disaster again...

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