Pynchon and postmodernism

[Otto]

> Pynchon and the Sixties
> David Cowart. Critique. Washington: Fall 1999.
> Vol.41, Iss. 1; pg. 3, 10 pgs
>
>
> The modernists strove to explore consciousness, time, and history -- the
> very realities most resistant to representation in words. Language
remained
> for them, nonetheless, an instrument of knowing, and thus Brian McHale has
> characterized the modernist project as epistemological in its premises,
> means, and goals. The postmodernists, by contrast, seem to have begun with
a
> recognition of the mimetic and referential shortcomings of language -- a
> perception that led, McHale argues, to a literary art more interested in
> ontology than in epistemology. As John Hawkes once remarked in an
interview,
> "I want to try to create a world, not represent it" (Enck 154).
>

Or, as John Barth says about the novelist and storyteller: "What he offers
you is not a *Weltanschauung* but a *Welt*; not a view of the cosmos, but a
cosmos itself.
(...)
All the scientists hope to do is describe the universe mathematically,
predict it, and maybe control it. The philosopher, by contrast, seems
unbecomingly ambitious: He wants to *understand* the universe, to get behind
phenomena and operation and solve the logically prior riddles of being,
knowledge and value. But the artist, and in particular the novelist, in his
essence wishes neither to explain nor to control nor to understand the
universe: He wants to make one of his own, and may even aspire to make the
world more orderly, meaningful, beautiful, and interesting than the one God
turned out." (17)

(John Barth, "How to Make a Universe," at: "The Friday Book," [1984] pp.
13-25)