TPPM (9): Pynchon's Grid Motif

[Kris Williams]

"It all goes along together. Parallel, not series. Metaphor.
Signs and symptoms. Mapping onto different coordinate systems, I don't know..." [...]
"Try to design anything that way and have it work" (GR: 159)

"If one long-recognized trademark of Modernist fiction is the interposing of a character's mind between the reader and the external (fictive) world, with all that that implies for the reader's reconstruction of reality, then another is certainly the use of more than one mediating consciousness. The presentation of multiple minds is likely to entail the use of some device for effecting transitions from one mind to another, some device, that is, for motivating the sequence of minds."

mediumistic, mimetically motivated mapping in GR:

http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/publications/poetics/art/mod6.html
  So "the Grid" is a kind of webspace, the global circuitry not of T-1 lines and telephone links but the primordial power grid itself, adopted for the sake of this fantasy to the needs of instant communication.
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