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

[David Casseres]

After all those years, I still recall the delightful shock that
passage gave me when I first read it.  It remains one of my favorite
bits of Pynchon.

On 2/2/06, Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com> wrote:
> Find the whole article at:
>
> http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3709/is_200304/ai_n9202426/pg_1
>
> 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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