Assembling postmodernism: Experience, meaning, and the space in-between

[Ghetta Life]

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Assembling postmodernism: Experience, meaning, and the space in-between

Early in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, we encounter the heroine, 
Oedipa Maas, standing on a hillside overlooking the Southern California city 
of San Narciso. As she surveys the landscape below with its "vast sprawl of 
houses,"

she [thinks] of the time she'd opened a transistor radio to replace a 
battery and [saw] her first printed circuit. The ordered swirl of houses and 
streets, from this high angle, sprang at her...with the same unexpected, 
astonishing clarity as the circuit card had...there were to both outward 
patterns a hieroglyphic sense of concealed meaning, of an intent to 
communicate. There'd seemed no limit to what the printed circuit could have 
told her (if she had tried to find out); so in her first minute of San 
Narciso, a revelation also trembled just past the threshold of her 
understanding. (Pynchon 1966, 13)

While superimposing her first printed circuit on the Southern California 
landscape in 1966, Oedipa, without quite realizing it, was standing on the 
verge of what we now call postmodernity. Both images-the postmodern city and 
printed circuit (a defining item of our information technology)and their 
complex, superimposed linkages are great icons of postmodernism.1 Now, more 
than a quarter of a century later, as the postmodern era might be drawing to 
a close, we are perhaps still just as puzzled and perplexed as we were at 
its beginning. Like the modernists, "We had the experience but missed the 
meaning," as T. S. Eliot observed in what became a famous truism of his 
era.2 Indeed, by now we appear to be as confused about the meaning of this 
term "postmodernism" as by the "postmodern" world itself. Like Oedipa, 
trying to navigate the labyrinths of Pynchon's novel, and like Sophocles's 
Oedipus wandering through the nightmare of his life, we may learn more and 
more, and yet its meaning (along with meaning itself) often seems-and 
is-maddeningly uncertain. And we are haunted by the possibility that it 
might never quite become clear.

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