If you could convene a dream panel of famous Pynchomanes...

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ya Sam [mailto:takoitov at hotmail.com]

...> Hanjo Beressem

had to look that one up

http://www2.uic.edu/~jtabbi/ebr5/tabbi.htm

 "The contribution by Hanjo Berressem demonstrates the precision with which Pynchon does in fact superimpose multiple worlds in Vineland and Gravity's Rainbow by carrying reality across various membrane surfaces (such as the film or television screen) and by bringing together such apparently disparate phenomena as Slothrop's sexual encounters and the pattern of V-2 Rocket hits throughout the city of London, both of which follow a Poisson distribution. Where most critics see such patternings as playful games or, at most, metaphors for some vague invisible intersection of "worlds," Beressem lends substance to the crossings with his own complex set of critical correspondences, in which the three-dimensional structure of the Lorenz attractor maps onto Jacques Lacan's "möbial . . . surface of human reality" and the various reality-games in Pynchon become precisely figured as three psychological forces: "the real (id), the imaginary (ego) and the symbolic (superego)" (44). 

Reading Berressem, one needs already to know and care a great deal not only about Pynchon but about Lacan and chaos- and catastrophe-theory."