PO-PO-mo-JO (was PO's Vision)

[Dave Monroe]

.... maybe you're just assuming that, because we are making similar
obsevations, we are coming to similar conclusions, is all, my fellow DM
(are we going to have to resort to middle initials here?).   We both
apparently perceive that perhaps Pynchon's (et al.), "postmodernist,"
whatever, "encyclopedism," intertextuality, whatever, is somehow
antithetical to that (romanticist) idea(l) of the author as singular,
orginary genius (though that Pynchonian cult of genus, that MacArthuir
Foundation "genius" grant of his, for that matter, do tend to
centrifugally recoup the centripetal force[s] of his texts ...), but
that's apparently a problem to you, whereas it's much appreciated on
this end.   Sound about right?  Perhaps we can disagree BECAUSE we
agree, to a certain extent ...

But I've been long intererested in said "intertextuality," which I
(again) take as not only a particular hallmark of "postmodernism," but
as a general condition of not only literature, but of language/s
it/themselves.  A minor episode in a Homeric epic becomes a short work
in a  Boccaccian collection becomes a Chaucerian poem becomes a
Shakespearean play becomes ... or yet another Homeric epic is woven with
a Dantean poem and a Viconian treatise and ... and ... and ... into a
Joycean novel.  For example ...

Question is, what makes postmodernist intertextulaity specifically
postmodernist?  Perhaps that foregrounding, perhaps that wearing of
intertuality on one's sleeve, at one's surface, but ... but perhaps we
don't recognize the profound intertextuality of earlier works because
we've preserved the works but have not quite retained their contexts, do
not so immediately recognize their intertexts.  But still ... but I
suspect (along with many others, as I recall, Fredric Jameson, Craig
Owens, Linda Hutcheon, et al.) that our archive--manuscript, print,
photographic, digital, et al.--of intertexts has reached an
overwhelming, perhaps even critical mass.  A la Jorge Luis Borges'
"Funes the Memorious"?  That "persistence of memory," indeed, and,
possibly, its "disintegration" as well.  See also, esp., on an SF tip,
"Melancholy Elephants" by Spider Robinson (in, strangely, his
collection, Melancholy Elephants) ...

Nice article by Simon Reynolds (Blissed Out, The Sex Revolts, Generation
Techno [a.k.a. Energy Flash], website @
http://members.aol.com/blissout/front.htm, and check out esp.--and,
esp., Kai--the "Rave Theory Tool Kit" @
http://members.aol.com/blissout/toolkit.htm) in the New York Times some
time back (ca. Jan., 1995?  Recounted, at any rate, in Jim Collins'
Architectures of Excess: Cultural Life in the Information Age) in re:
the presumably "postmodern" phenomenon of "record collection rock."

As I recall, Reynolds' point was, "influence" (an on this trope, see
Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance
Poetry, maybe John Guillory, Poetic Authority: Spencer, Milton and
Literay History),  no matter how much many (romanticist) musicians might
protest, is inevitable.  Question is, what are one's influneces, what
records are in one's collection, and how are they being connected?  Or
disconnected, for that matter ... think, say, Stereolab, early on, at
least, often "Hallo Gallo" by Neu! meets Francoise Hardy, and so forth.
As Brian Eno notes, "we have moved from the notion of artist as creator
to that of the artist as curator" or somesuch (source?  Can't recall,
came up in re: My Bloody Valentine's "Soon," and that's all I can
recall) ...