pynchon's style

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 lawrence c. wolfley finishes his well known article "repression's rainbow: the 
 presence of norman o. brown in pynchon's big novel" (pmla 92, 1977, pp. 
 873-889; here quoted in own re-translation from the german version in the 
 ickstadt-reader, page 224) with the following words:

  
 "pynchon's style is also his heaviest argument against determinism. like most 
novel-writers today, he is obsessed by the problem of human freedom, and 
pointsman does indeed symbolize a serious threat. it appears strange that so 
many critics (and readers) still look only at the level of the content of novels 
for signs of hope, - confirmations for the old humanist ideal of the autonomous 
ego, indications for the resistance of something 'good inside humanity' against 
power and greed or an open 'moral of the story' -, while there, strictly 
speaking and argued from a psychoanalytical point of view, c a n  be no hope: we 
all are on death-row. the optimism, pynchon nevertheless keeps for himself, is 
grounded and manifested, like the one of brown, outside of our 
material-political world. what counts is only personal freedom, and pynchon 
knows that the best guarantor of this freedom is not heisenberg's 
unschärferelation, also not dialectics, but the intuitive symbolic process of 
language".  

  again: all parallels to current debates are completely accidental ...

kfl