Reckoning on the Read: Misc. on pattern recogniton

[Mark Kohut]

Just FYI: Tony Tanner said in 1971 that The Recognitions was a seriously
neglected American novel...he knew of almost no studies, few essays of it
then....thought it was unique and neglected enough to not have 
influenced many writers in his City Of Words----Pynchon's V. being the exception
he wrote..


In TT's intro to that book, he focuses on Poe's Arthur Gordon Pym as a 
prophetic novel about a pervasive theme he finds in most of the writers
he deals with:   "The problem of whether there are significant patterns and
signs to be detected in reality"......which obsesses so many recent American
writers....(which is why he alludes later to The Recognitions' delving into
that obsession early, before the sixties' writers.)

I don't know this Poe work but evidently Poe writes himself into that book, 
fictionally, as
the editor giving 'minute philological scrutiny' to Pym's heiroglyphics.......

The fictional Poe gives some possible meanings to the heiroglyphics 
but the depth of the fiction, says
Tony, is that the question whether the words were 'graven within the hills' or 
supplied
by the [fictional[ editor, or whether nature was encoded or blank is one of 
Poe's most
brilliant handlings, he sez. 

Very like our questioning discussions.