literary puzzle

[David Morris]

The question of intended meaning is akin to a puzzle's solution.  Pynchon 
lays obvious "pointers" to "significant" clues aiming at a "solution" in all 
his texts.  HyperArts has done a fine initial effort to compile an 
alphabetical list of such obvious clue words and concepts.  Meanings are 
expansive, and their overlapping boundaries push the reader toward his own 
creations.  But ultimately we are left with the question of whether the 
author has a point or whether he's just been stringing us along:  Has 
Pynchon embodied the literary form of The Confidence Man:  Has he just 
arranged to part us from our time and money?  Or has he acted the Trickster 
with an altruistic method, always intending resolution to reside outside his 
texts?  Or...

David Morris

>From: Doug Millison
>"Perhaps because I had grown up surrounded by abstract
>expressionist painters, I had always thought the
>search for meaning was vulgar; much later I realized
>that I was for that very reason an unsatisfactory
>reader of Robbe-Grillet, who counted on his audience's
>urge to solve puzzles, even though he did not always
>make them solvable: There was a good reason he'd
>declared he was the natural descendant of Kafka."
>
>from a recent article by Edmund White,
>http://www.calendarlive.com/top/1,1419,L-LATimes-Books-X!ArticleDetail-41394,00.html
>
>Perhaps Pynchon is counting "on his audience's urge to
>solve puzzles, even though he did not always make them
>solvable" wtr COL49.

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