pynchon-l-digest V2 #9465

[alice wellintown]

> Re: The Pierce-Pynchon-Descartes method
>
> My favourite read against method is not Feyerabend but Eco/Sebeok: The Sign
> of Three:  Dupin, Holmes,Pierce.


Thank you. I don't want to make too much of that famous phrase from
GR, "No, this is not a disentanglement from, but a progressive
knotting into...", but, since Pynchon, after what might be called his
post-Adams years, that is, after the Slow Learner Stories excepting
the "The Secret Integration", so Oedipa's story, we notice that P has
changed in a major way, and, dare I say, he maintains this through the
rest of his writing. The Critical Industry focused on the apparent
postmodernism of this shift, so McHale, for example, notes that P has
undermined the modernist reading of postmodernist texts, and so on,
and I've no argument with these readings and find them fascinating and
useful, but only want to suggest that Pynchon fits quite snugly into
the American Tradition and this includes Poe and James. Like Poe P
argues against the method of Holmes (Poe does this explicitly in one
of the tales, forgotten which one), and James.