TRP Reference in Intro to Re-Issue of Nog by Wurlitzer

[Keith]

If the self is a story we tell ourselves, then those avant-garde  
story-tellers eager and willing to undermine their own game become  
hermenauts of the new subjectivity. In Ulysses, Joyce experimented  
with the forms of fiction in order to experiment with subjectivity  
itself, and especially to probe the contours and paradoxes of the  
“stream of consciousness” that William James had established as the  
foundation of human perception. Joyce made room for epiphany, but in  
the works of a number of challenging postwar novelists—including  
Burroughs, Beckett, and Robbe-Grillet—the tango between self and  
language grows increasingly desultory, aphasiac, and absurd. Perhaps  
the most comic example is Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, whose  
protagonist Tyrone Slothrop simply disappears in the second half of  
the novel, with neither rhyme nor reason. (Erik Davis)

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