MDDM World-as-text

[Otto]

Rob:
> As soon as a person writes or says or thinks or senses (or paints or
> dances
> or whatever other form of expression) that "the world is this or that", he
> or she is creating a text, a representation or interpretation, of the
> world.
>

Very good explanation, Rob. But John Barth maybe would not agree totally. He
puts it this way (and I've always loved especially this essay):

"The storytellers' trade is the manufacture of universes (...) You hear it
said that the novelist offers you an attitude toward life and the world. Not
so, except incidentally or by interference. What he offers you is not a
*Weltanschauung* but a *Welt*: not a view of the cosmos, but a cosmos
itself. (...) He wants to make one of his own, and may even aspire to make
it more orderly, meaningful, beautiful, and interesting than the one God
turned out."
(John Barth, "How To Make a Universe" at "The Friday Book", NY 1984, p. 17)

I'm quite sure that this it what Pynchon is doing, that his WW-II as
presented in GR isn't the historical war. If Steven Weisenburger is right
about the dates (December 18, 1944 as the time of the first five chapters),
it is interesting to note that there isn't a V2-hit on London reported that
day; only on Lüttich (Liege) and Antwerpen (I found out due to an
offlist-conversation with Douglas Lannark recently). It makes sense to me
that Pynchon carefully has chosen *that* day in order *not* to be a realist:

"Consider that if the novelist is like God and a novel like the universe,
then the converse ought to have at least some metaphorical truth: The
universe is a novel; God is a novelist! (I have observed elsewhere that the
trouble with God is not that He's a *bad* novelist; only that He's a
realistic one, and that dates Him.)(1) (Barth's footnote: "But also keeps
bringing Him into fashion.")
(ibid, p. 22-23)

>
> The argument is not that the world doesn't exist.
>

Right, hasn't this to do with the Saussuran binary of signifier and
signified too?

> And "textual" isn't
> meant as a synonym for "verbal".
>
> I would have thought the idea of the world-as-text was quite a familiar
> one to most Westerners:
>
> En arche en ho logos, kai ho logos en pros ton theon, kai theos en ho
> logos.
>
> "In the beginning was the Word and the Word was with God and the Word was
> God."
>

I've never read it in the Greek version.

> http://urizen1.home.mindspring.com/pageart/ancient.jpg
>
> It's the parochial and arrogant belief that any single perception/
> representation/"text" of the world is the one and only "truth", which
> postmodernism, and Pynchon, are contesting by invoking and/or endorsing
> this idea of the world-as-text.
>

My favourite Barth-phrase: it goes without saying.

Otto

> best
>
>
> > Even sense -- visual, aural, touch, taste, -- perceptions that are
> > communicated and understood without verbalization?   Beyond the purely
> > sensual, there's a broad range of subjective experience that is never
> > translated into words (emotional, spiritual).  I agree it is a common
> > experience people to interpret various sorts of sensations, feelings,
> > thoughts, experiences, objects, physical realities, smells, sounds,
> > memories, etc. of all sorts in verbal formulations, but "always textual"
> > claims a totality of experience I don't think you can successfully
> defend.
>
>
> Terrance wrote:
>
> > I can't quite get this idea of the
> > world-as-text.
> > Can't remember where this idea comes from. Roland Barthes uses this idea
> > in the text Otto cited and I think it's a pretty common idea floating
> > around college campuses these days.
>
>

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