MDDM World-as-text

[jbor]

on 13/8/02 12:20 PM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> 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.

I don't think this is true. I've addressed the questions and demurs you
raised in some detail. Perhaps if you could quote something which I was
arguing earlier that you have a problem with, I could try to address it, and
I'm pretty sure that Otto would be only too pleased to do the same.

> There is
> also nothing postmodern about the metonymic use of other arts in novels.

I disagree. Pynchon's novels are widely regarded as exemplars for postmodern
fiction. One notion which figures prominently in postmodernist philosophy
and theory (in Derrida, for example, and certainly following on from
Nietzsche) is this idea of world-as-text. In the example below, from
Pynchon's most recent novel, the etching is not a metonym for art, or for
the writing of the fiction, it is a metonym for the world outside the
fictional text. These farmers (who are not in fact characters in Pynchon's
novel at all) are walking away (out of the narrative) into the looming
sunset (of, or back into, "history").

    [...] 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)

Like the way "a Chain's length may, upon the clement Page, pass little
notic'd, whilst in an Ambuscade, may reckon as, perhaps, all,-- or Nothing"
(673.7), it is another manifestation in Pynchon's novel of the trope of the
world-as-text. And, cf. also, amongst many other examples:

Cape Town: "a Town with a precarious Hold upon the Continent, planted as
upon another World by the sepia-shadow'd Herren XVII back in Holland ... "
                                                            (58.14)

Mason regarding the Cape as "a Parable about Slavery and Free Will he
fancies he has almost tho' not quite grasp'd ... " (158.12)

The way the meeting with the Proprietors and their retinue of legal advisors
in London is circumscribed: "the Sketch-Artists having dash'd in a few last
Details and crept away ... " (246.16)

And, of course, the way the denouement of the scene between Gottfried and
Blicero "must be read as a card ... (roughly drawn in soiled white, army
gray, spare as a sketch on a ruined wall) ... " (GR 724)

These are quite beautifully-rendered conceits, Escheresque, Möbius-looping,
reflexive, postmodern.

best