MDDM World-as-text

[Terrance]

John Bailey wrote:
> 
> M&D is a text. It makes one aware of this pretty often. It also makes one
> aware of when it was written.


Yes, all of P's novels are texts. And all remind us, quite often,  that
they are in fact texts. This is an feature not only of thousands of
novels spread over 800 odd years (give or take depending on how you
define the novel), but of literature in general. 

Do the moderns or postmoderns remind us that we are reading a text more
often than the authors of 18th century prose literature? Are  Beckett's
works more aware of their fictionality and textness than Sterne's TS or
Cervantes's DQ? 

I think the answer is no. The current interest in this "text-as-world"
is nothing new under the sun. In fact it was all the rage when Aristotle
was alive and kicking, but now we have structuralists and
post-structuralists, postmodernism and postmodernists or Skeptics and
Sophists of a different epoch (a semantic one). When Aristotle was
around folks were interested in Being. Today we are interested in
Meaning--language. We've gone through several cycles, from being to
knowing to  meaning and back to Being, with all manner of hype and
hoopla when a new TURN (linguistic, Copernican, etc, etc.) adds a Post
to a dead era. 




> 
> I won't say it's self-aware. I don't like that term, as it gives too much
> agency to a text. It's hard enough to say that people are self-aware.


Some use the term self-conscious! But a text isn't conscious so how can
it be self-conscious? Reflexive is the philosophical term. But this a
term philosophers also reserve for the mind. Aristotle's text can be
said to include the idea of reflexivity, that is the mind thinking about
thinking, but the text itself is not thinking about anything. 

> 
> But it draws attention to the particular historical circumstance in which it
> was written, which have been characterised as postmodern. 

The novels remind us that they are products of a particular time.
Pynchon's novels are constantly reminding us that they were written post
W.W.II. Some may characterize this period as postmodern. I do so here
only because it's convenient here, but most of the time I don't use this
term (postmodern) because I don't thinks its meaningful or/and neither
do most people I talk to. 


I'm not talking
> about the same Postmodernism which is often confused with Modernism.


Not sure there is a difference. 



> 'Self-awareness' can often be attributed to Modernist texts, and plenty
> pre-Modernism. 


Agreed, see above. 


But we do live in a certain time, which is in some ways
> different from other times, which I think of as postmodern. The word
> contains another word, modern, and so does the time.


I don't see any reason to define our times as postmodern or the
literature written during this period as postmodern literature. 


Modernism: diverse
  cross-fertilization between cultures, between art forms and
  between disciplines-the need to confront violence, nihilism,
  and despair; the fascination with, but fear of, the
  unconscious; the centrality of a dramatized narrator who is
  not omniscient but rather himself searching for
  understanding; a symbolic richness which invites multiple
  interpretations (influence of French Symbolism), radical
  redefinition of the real (W and H James, Freud, Bergson)
  Colonial programs, ruthless exploitation, journey (up the
  Congo) or Modern (T.S. Eliot secularized) quest or symbolic
  exploration into the darkest heart (consciousness) of Man,
  manipulation of the reader's experience of time and space by
  means of disruption of narrative chronology and
  ontological/epistemological differentiation and the
  representation of consciousness (stream and multiple) by the
  description of events, and the use of the  "reflexivity" (sorry
couldn't resist)  and
  self-consciousness.