SLSL It's raining Frogs & Mirrors

[William Zantzinger]

--- David Morris <fqmorris at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > --- William Zantzinger
> <williamzantzinger at yahoo.com> wrote:
> > > 
> > > Pynchon's reader has every right to feel conned,
> bullied, betrayed. Indeed,
> these responses are the essence of the aesthetic
> effect of Gravity's Rainbow.
> The reader has been invited to undertake the kinds
> of pattern-making and
> pattern-interpreting operations which, in the
> Modernist texts with which
> > > we have all become familiar, would produce
> intelligible meaning; here, they
> produce *almost* [fq's *'s] a parody of
> intelligibility.... 
> 
> Ah, but the "almost" is most important, isn't it? 
> And why is that word so
> important?  Easy.  Is Pynchon ultimately a big con
> man?, bamboozelor?, with no
> "sincere" content?   Or is he himself actively
> attempting to engage that which
> he presents?  Does he ultimately only engage us (and
> maybe himself) in a
> cynical game without a heart?

Just sticking with GR I would say the book has  quite
a cynical tone. I just happened to be reading The
Voice, there is an article on 1984. A cynical
word--nineteen-eighty-four. Pynchon uses it, alludes
to that book. Pynchon, it was argued, is a pretty
cynical dude and he is a master of parody and so his
SL Introduction is not be taken at face value. I don't
know if P is cynical but his words set a cynical tone.



Words have what Sapir calls feeling-tones. Think about
the word "mother" in GR. 

http://www.bartleby.com/186/pages/page41.html





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