Petillon

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

I did an Abebooks search on Pierre-Yves Petillon, and find he was a frequent contributor to a French periodical called "Critique" in at least the 60s, 70s and 80s...

Is he one of those po-mo guys? He seems not to be in Wikipedia.

while dabbling around from that, found and just read the Chomsky diatribe on po-mo http://cscs.umich.edu/~crshalizi/chomsky-on-postmodernism.html

but that dates from 1995.  Seems he had significant differences with Derrida at the time.  The diatribe jobates (to use an M&D word) rather lengthily and ramblingly, (he said calling the kettle black.) but basically says that if that school has any fresh insights that can be put into simple terms, he challenges any proponents to explain them to him.

I know that Deleuze and Guattari figure in Vineland, so I should be itching to read them...(got to get hopping on "Education of Henry Adams first, though - and I've determined I need to read the companion piece too, something about Chartres) ... also, didn't Deleuze actually die in a rather Pynchonian manner: defenestration?  I think it may be significant that the D&G Italian Wedding Fakebook that saves Billy Barf's bacon is found not in their van, but in the Wayvone library - 

just as a recent East European relatively non-violent revolution (don't remember the details, our neighborhood anarchist was telling me about it) bore the hallmarks of a campaign strategy suggested by a prominent left-anarchist thinker and apparently co-opted by the State Dep't or somebody






> -----Original Message-----
> From: Dave Monroe [mailto:monropolitan at yahoo.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 27, 2006 04:52 PM
> To: 'Chris Broderick', pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: "exhausted by Mark Z Danielewski's dense and overly-complicated tome"
> 
> From Pierre-Yves Petillon, "A Re-cognition of Her
> Errand into the Wilderness," New Essays on The Crying
> of Lot 49, ed. Patrick O'Donnell (New York: Cambridge
> UP, 1991), pp. 127-70 ...
> 
>    "As The Crying of Lot 49 nears its end, the
> Tristero, which has been looming up all along, comes
> dangerously close to losing the teasing
> epistemological uncertainty it has retained thus far
> in the novel.  As Oedipa stumbles along a railroad
> track ... she remembers things she would have seen 'if
> only she had looked' (179) ....
> 
> [...]
>  
>    "The Tristero underground has so far been implies
> to be a motley crew of eccentrics and bohemian
> drop-outs, an archipelago of 'isolates' having
> 'withdrawn' from the Republic, a lunatic fringe in
> tatters.  But suddenly, in this last rhetorical leap,
> the Tristero broadens its scope to include, in a
> grand, almost liturgical gesture, all the outcasts of
> American history....  By the end of the novel the
> Tristero, shadowy as it still remains, is no longer a
> ghostly underground (perhaps entirely phantasmatic)
> but a real, 'embattled' underground about to come out
> of the shadows.  No longer hovering on the edge as a
> cryptic plot, the 'Other' that the Tristero has thus
> far represented is almost revealed as a version of
> 'the other America' that Michael Harrington described
> ....  This America is 'the America of poverty,'
> 'hidden today in a way it never was before,'
> 'dispossesed,' 'living on the fringes, the margin,' as
> 'internal exiles.'
>    "Looking back on the novel from the perspective of
> its finale, it coul almost be viewed as a New Deal
> novel, concerned with gathering back into the American
> fold a 'third world' previouly excluded...." (pp.
> 149-50)
> 
> http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0208&msg=69706
> 
> --- Chris Broderick <elsuperfantastico at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> > 
> > I certainly don't think that the Tristero is an
> > empty signifier ...
> 
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