Working At Cross Purposes?

[Mark Kohut]

'deliberative incorporation of play into the text" ???

I might have thought the comic scenes were more like "play"?




--- On Tue, 7/8/08, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
> Subject: Working At Cross Purposes?
> To: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Tuesday, July 8, 2008, 10:55 AM
> Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 is an example of a
> novel that
> doesn't challenge the reader to interpret it, but does
> challenge the
> reader to complete it without succumbing to paranoid
> schizophrenic
> thought patterns. Pynchon's uses the text to trip up
> the reader's
> rhythm and confound perception. He does this specifically
> by placing
> complex sentence structures into longer passages filled
> with simply
> structured sentences. This builds a cadence that pulls the
> reader
> along, only to trick the mind into feeling it has lost its
> place when
> a sentence doesn't follow the same pattern. The eye
> automatically
> scans to the top of the paragraph and you wind up rereading
> portions
> of the text. This, perhaps more than anything else I've
> read, strikes
> me as the deliberate incorporation of play into a literary
> form....
> 
> http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/2008/07/working-at-cross-purposes/