Working At Cross Purposes?

[Guy Ian Scott Pursey]

The rest of the "Man Bytes Blog" article suggests that Pynchon is the closest literature has got, in the blogger's opinion, to being a video game. By "play" I think he means interactivity of the kind most commonly encountered in video games - whereby the "consumer" is challenged by the very thing they are consuming thus making "completion" of the narrative more difficult.

With Lot 49, he suggests the cadence of the sentences force the reader into paranoid thought processes. No doubt the odd structure of the book does this too. What he doesn't mention is that this then forces the reader to identify with Oedipa who is (also) paranoid and uncovering these details as we are. So perhaps, the reader becomes the "player" of the book and Oedipa the avatar; we don't see the world through her eyes (or tear-filled goggles) as you would in a first-person narrative but maybe we're locked in just behind and above her as she moves around her projected world, each part rendered just as we approach it, but at other times stored, data that's waiting, in the circuitry of cities, as seen from above......

Really interesting article. Thanks!

Guy

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org on behalf of Dave Monroe
Sent: Tue 7/8/2008 16:39
To: markekohut at yahoo.com
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: Working At Cross Purposes?
 
On 7/8/08, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> 'deliberative incorporation of play into the text" ???
>
> I might have thought the comic scenes were more like "play"?

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog/ECOOPE.html

http://www.hydra.umn.edu/derrida/sign-play.html