MDDM World-as-text

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> These forms of "text" are certainly used metonymically in Pynchon's novels.

This is quite another argument. Obviously P uses painting, film, dance,
metonymically in his novels.  What modern novelist doesn't? 





> Botticelli's painting and Mélanie's dance in _V._, Varo's painting and the
> children's dance in _Lot 49_ (Oedipa's dance with the deaf mute could be
> another moment when the possibility of getting beyond human perception is
> represented), or Slothrop's dance with the little girl outside the fire in
> _GR_.
> 
> And:
> 
>     [...] 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)
> 
> The idea of world-as-text (here, an etching) is very important in Pynchon's
> fiction, and is a constant theme running through it from beginning to end.

OK, Robert. If this is what you mean by the **idea** of world-as-text" I
have no problem with it. It's not at all what you were arguing earlier
or what Otto has been talking about or how the thread started. There is
also nothing postmodern about the metonymic use of other arts in novels.