Snappycrossdresser

[Otto]

> On Fri, 2004-10-15 at 15:56, Otto wrote:
> > >
> > > Would anyone care to state
> >
> > yes
> >
> > >in a few concise preferably grammatical
> > > sentences
> >
> > no
> >
> > >what makes Pynchon po-mo?
> > >
> > > Just wondered.
> > >
> >
> > the reversal of cause and effect
> Roger sez he's not quite ready to give up on cause and effect.
>
> There's also the rocket striking before it's heard.
>
> These are possibly nods to Derrida's cause and effect deconstruction.
> But let's face it. The reversal of cause and effect is nothing in
> itself. If it has any importance at all, it would be some implication
> about the use of language to produce fixed truth.
>

But that's exactly the point. The possibility of producing a fixed truth by
language is rather limited because of it's binary structure of significant
and significate, because of the différance.

>
>
> >
> > binary oppositions, unity of opposites, entropy, chaos, indeterminacy
> >
> There's a big OVERdeterminancy. With the location of Slothrup's  sex
> conquests determining where the V-2s come down. Or is that just
> prediction?
>

That's a violation of the laws of statistics.

> > Pilgrim's progress and pentecost postmodern (no salvation, no
revelation)
>
> But there were angels appearing to the dying.
>

If those people were dying how could they tell? You may believe in angels, I
don't.

>Angels are beings that reveal things.

"Who, if I screamed, would hear me among the angelic orders?
And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart,
I would fade in the strength of his stronger existence.
For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror
that we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it
is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.
Every angel is terrifying."
(Rilke)

> >
> > re-writing of official history
>
> Yes, but should the rewritings always be paranoias? This would give
> revisionist history a bad name.
>

What's paranoid about Charles Mason & Jeremiah Dixon having a good smoke
with George Washington, making fun of the "historical truth" that Washington
grew hemp *and* making fun of the hippie-assertion* that he smoked it?

*in R.A. Wilson's "Illuminatus"

I think it's more important to question first everything that is presented
to us as a historical truth. Don't want to point to WMD's here & now but
it's the most recent example. If I were a feudal Arab ruler I would develop
paranoia.

> That World War II was just a shuffling of markets, the killing of so
> many people merely a distraction, a sideshow for innocents, providing
> vivid material for schoolbooks.
>

Yes, that's what he says about it.

>
> > self-reflexive writing
> This may be the most po-mo thing he has going for him, even though
> self-reflexivity isn't anything that just appeared in po-mo times.
>

That's correct, "Tristram Shandy" written today would be considered
postmodern:

"(...) the application of a (...) deconstructive skepticism to themselves
especially distinguishes the fictions of Gaddis and Pynchon as postmodern.
These reflexive or self-reflecting texts incorporate metacommentary on the
processes of literary imagination and composition which shape them, in the
manner of Sternes's "Tristram Shandy" or the Spanish picaresque novel."
(Robert Jackson, "Intertextualism: The Case of Pynchon and Patrick White,"
PN 46-49, p. 61)

> I'm not saying you're wrong, Otto, but I think you need more
> clarification.
>

Oh Paul, I've tried that so often in the last five years. And Rob is much
better in this than I am as his essay in the last Pynchon Notes and his
numerous posts on this list prove.

Mr. Derrida said: "It is impossible to respond. I can only do something
which will leave me unsatisfied."
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/10/obituaries/10derrida.html

Otto