The Quest and the Grail (or Logocentrism)

[Doug Millison]

Morris:  "[snip]  it's truly amazing how difficult it is for any 
individual to get his hands around that message, much less come to 
any agreement with others about what that "same old" message is."

What I find amazing is how many Pynchon readers actually do manage to 
get their arms around Pynchon and make sense of his work, in ways 
that can interest,  entertain, and engage the rest of us, and which 
advance the ongoing conversation about Pynchon and literature and so 
many other issues that reading Pyncon can raise. Admittedly, not much 
of this sense-making shows up in this forum, but then that doesn't 
seem to be what this forum is about, most of the time these days at 
least. But, the recent OKC Law Review issue devoted to Pynchon, and 
even more so the just-published Pynchon Notes (#42-43) contain many 
articles that shed real light on Pynchon's works, argued rigorously, 
backed up with research and close reading of the texts. Read 
Weisenburger on GR's ghosts (Haunted History and Gravity's Rainbow; 
PN 42-43); Madsen on  William Pynchon and William Slothrop (Family 
Legcies:  Identifying the Traces of William Pynchon in Gravity's 
Rainbow ; PN 42-43); Duyfhuizen on the relationship between GR and 
the  '64 movie Operation Crossbow (Gravity's Rainbow, Operation 
Crossbow; PN 42-43); Vaska Tumir on Pynchon's cities (The City, the 
Labyrinth and the Terror Beyond:  Delineating a Site of the Possible 
in Gravity's Rainbow; PN 42-43), and I previously mentioned 
Crownshaw's article on GR and the Holocaust.  Nuanced, sophisticated, 
full of nuggets that immediately enrich the reading of GR -- even for 
an amateur like myself with little background in literary critical 
theory, these essays (I've only gotten that far into the PN issue, 
and have yet to tackle the Law Review volume) demonstrate, to my 
satisfaction at least, just how much fun and deep and civil 
state-of-the-art conversation about Pynchon can be. Thanks again to 
the editors and contributors of these publications.  For anybody 
who'd like to move the P-list conversation to a higher plane, there's 
no shortage of material to talk about, and no shortage of examples of 
how, in fact, serious readers can sustain a serious conversation 
about Pynchon.

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