Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses

[Otto Sell]

Terrance wrote:

>P certainly has a lot to say about language, writing,
>meaning, being, knowing...but even if P calls attention to
>D(d)econstruction or to the groundlessness of language and
>writing and meaning...we can not with confidence, imho, say
>that he agrees that language, writing, meaning, are
>groundless or that he agrees with the project(s) of
>Deconstruction or that Deconstruction's approach to his
>texts is in some ways germane while other approaches are
>unapt simply because he calls attention to it, even if he
>and some of his contemporaries and some of his critics, all
>in an above average manner, go out of their way to call
>attention to it.

> I guess what I'm saying Paul, is that deconstruction, while
> P certainly makes use of what can be identified as
> deconstructing tactics, strategies, and his intentions for
> doing so may be instructive, if only in that they add
> another term, reverse the polarities or subvert the
> logocentric blah blah blah, race, gender, all those
> conditioned reader responses, conditioned constructions
> of..., deconstruction is merely encyclopedic, more of P's
> erudition, a strategy of his narrators and a target of his
> satire.
>

Otto sez:
. . . and all that religious, esoterical, symbolical, technical,
psychological, ethnical, historical, opera, theatre, cinema blah blah blah
in his books . . . all approaches to P.'s texts you named are covered by
deconstruction and logocentrism, but every "single" approach misses the
point.

<deconstruction is merely encyclopedic> is a statement that will be hard to
prove -there is a certain mannerism in many postmodern texts- but The Crying
of Lot 49 isn't simply an encyclopaedia of the different meanings of the
word "lot" in the English language or a collection of the 49-symbolism and
the end of the story not only a simple reference to the second chapter of
the "Acts" -- Oedipa waits in vain for the "word" - Pynchon is
deconstructing the binary of the original holy "word" (given by God) and the
secular, human "text," imho expressing his way of thinking about this
religious fake-story called New Testament. It's just a story, just a text,
told by men (males), no holy truth at all.

12 - Amazed and confused they all kept asking each other, "What does this
mean?"
13 - But others made fun of the believers, saying, "These men are drunk."

O.
(heavily intoxicated)