literary puzzle

[Otto]

Interestingly enough the title of White's article is "Against
Interpretation" which reminds me again of Susan Sontag's essay by the same
title, which, surely not so coincidential, my professor urged us to read
before we started any discussion on COL49.


> "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.
>
>
 Pynchon mentioned:
"Pynchon, clearly the giant of the group, wrote with "Gravity's Rainbow" a
homemade masterpiece in the line of "Moby-Dick" that, like Melville's book,
mixed in technical information with apocalyptic visions and that, like
Joyce's "Ulysses," proceeded through pastiche and collage. Pastiche--whether
of early English novels, fairy tales or (in "Gravity's Rainbow") of Hitler's
prose, Rilke, English World War II fiction, comic strips and bawdy
songs--was obviously important to postmodernist American writing."

Otto