MDDM World-as-text

[Doug Millison]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:It seems to me that
flame-bait and ad hominem
> attacks are the tactics
> Doug and Terrance most commonly use. Just for the
> record.


Now that whatever point it is you're trying to make
about "world-as-text" is hopelessly muddled, I guess
I'm not surprised to see this jab, but we can ignore
it and move on, unless you particularly want to start
an argument instead of pursuing a discussion -- your
choice...meanwhile,

Do you really think that Pynchon's work demonstrates
that the world *is* actually a text, that all of
worldly experience reduces to text, that text is
necessary for experience in the world?

If you answer affirmatively by re-defining "text" to
mean text-plus-everything-else, how can that mean
anything worth taking seriously?

You collapse the disctinction -- between "text" (which
abstracts and seeks to analyze and control existence)
and the world which always, successfully, resists such
abstraction -- that Pynchon's work illustrates.

 [...] At length, the last of the Farmers, new-bought
pots and pans
    a-clank, goes riding off into a dusk render'd in
copper-plate, gray 
and
    black, the Hatching too crowded to allow for any
reversal, or 
return....
                                                      
     (682.14)

This passage doesn't demonstrate that the world is
text, but it does show the narrator comparing this
scene to an etching, the use of "world-as-text" as a
metaphor, not an erasure of M&D's  distinction between
world and text.

The narrator "paints" a picture ("etches" to be
precise), prettified for tyhe benefit of his
"listeners" (readers),  sentimentalized in the
process. It's the narrator's interpetation, via text,
of a worldly experience (watching the farmers
disappear into the dusk) that requires no text
whatsover as it is actually happening -- only in
retrospect, "Ah, yes, that's the way it was in those
halcyon days before the Revolution, when we and
America were young, it was just like that..."  The
narrator's textual recreation of this worldly
experience does not recreate the experience as it was
in that moment, reflecting as it does the
storyteller's after-the-fact judgements as he charges
the scene with whatever values the storyteller wants
to add in order to entertain, amuse, delight, mystify,
etc. 



=====
<www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com>

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