gnostic and Gnostic

[jbor]

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>From: Dave Monroe <monroe at mpm.edu>
>To: pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: gnostic and Gnostic
>Date: Wed, Dec 20, 2000, 1:40 PM
>

> "Derrida, Lyotard and Pynchon."  Oh, my.   Already quite the leap to
> name Lyotard a "deconstructionist" there

Lyotard's "incredulity towards metanarratives ("les grands récits") is
certainly a type of, and owes a debt to, deconstruction. You bandy about
certain terms as vast generalisations (eg "gnostic", "deconstruction",
"postmodernism") and then quibble about the practice when it suits you to
perceive others doing the same.

> But if you've a problem granting Pynchon a working knowledge of, say,
> gnosticism, Baudelaire, whatever, ca. V., let it first be noted that he
> would have been even less likely to have been under the direct influence
> of Derrida ca. Gravity's Rainbow, D&d only really much arriving on US
> shores ca. the publication of GR

What I have been addressing is what
"Pynchon achieves in his novels (in similar ways and concurrently with, but
not dependent upon Derrida, Lyotard, Baudrillard etc)" 14/12

And you're quite wrong about when Derrida (and deconstruction) rocked the
U.S. critics' world. It happened in 1966, when his essay 'Structure, Sign
and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences' was contributed to a
conference at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

It has never been my contention that Derrida influenced Pynchon. Nor that
Pynchon, Derrida and Lyotard's work is somehow "elided". These are your
"straw men". I concur wholeheartedly with Otto:

    The word "deconstruction" may be an
    'invention' by JD but the necessity of
    the process itself for describing our
    "brave new world" properly has been
    seen by several others, including TRP,
    too.

> "There is" indeed "more to" deconstruction "than simply" (though I'd
> note that this sin't necessarily all that simple, as I've apparently
> been demonstrating myself here ...) "the demonstration of
> intertextuality."  "It" indeed "isn't *just* a 'game.'"  But, "surely,"
> I never wrote that "it" was, nor did I write that "deconstructive
> analyses" are "simply the demonstration of intertextuality."

You described the "deconstructive move" as being this in your eyes. I
assumed you meant exclusively as you seemed to be offering it as refutation;
you did not flag it otherwise.

> And, again, granting anything its "very nature" is, indeed, an
> essentializing move, a repetition of an essentializing move, at any
> rate, that "very" essentializing move that, say, the religious makes in
> essentializing, naturalizing, itself, as having an essence, a nature, as
> essential, natural.  Which is the "very" move that the deconstructive
> contests.

Yes, "by its very nature" *as it defines itself*: which is where you've got
to begin, let's face it. This is what you're deconstructing, surely, the way
a text's been constructed, construes itself etc?

> But someone once asked me something to the effect of, is deconstruction
> something that is done to texts, or is deconstruction something that
> texts do to themselves?

It's a process of demonstrating how a text is constructed; not the
*reconstruction* of the text as something else again.

> But, again, while I've no particular qualms about kicking around the
> terms "postmodern," "postmodernist," "postmodernism" myself, there is
> that hazard--and one "we've" fallen into here, again--of, say, A is
> postmodern, B is postmodern, therefore A is similar to B; or C is a sign
> of the postmodern, D displays said sign, therefore D is necessarily
> postmodern; or, E is postmodern, F is a characteristic of E, therefore F
> is characteristically postmodern.  And so forth, never really quite
> holding up to scrutiny ...

You've already commented on the similarities between Pynchon and Derrida *in
this very post*, and now you appear to be arguing against it. It's all just
semantics dressed up in argument's clothing with you, isn't it.

>
> But that "point," those "point(s)" of Pynchon's fiction (or his
> non-fiction, for that matter, though I would note that an awful lot of
> fact pervades those fictions, and perhaps even vice versa), well, that's
> what we've all been waiting for, no?   Point us to 'em there, cap'n  ...

Well, the equation "gnostic" = "evil" certainly *isn't* one. For starters.
Which is "the point" you seem to be having so much trouble with ...