Stanislaw Lem on GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

[Erik T. Burns]

Pastiche, maybe…

On Wed, 6 Aug 2025 at 00:58, j e l <ssnomes at gmail.com> wrote:

> This has got to be some kind of translation issue maybe? I've never
> considered GR as a type of collage...
>
> From "Lem in a Nutshell"
> [Written Interview with Stanislaw Lem, July 1994]
> in A Stanislaw Lem Reader
> [Edited by Peter Swirski]
> Northwestern University Press.  Evanston, Illinois, 1997.
> 129 pages.
>
>
> To put it bluntly: viewers perceive whatever they shape, interpret, and
> aesthetically evaluate for themselves. Today such evaluations are already
> arbitrarily erratic, thanks to postmodernism which obliterated the boundary
> between a work of art and a piece of garbage.
>      The same phenomena of linguistic degeneracy can be observed in
> literature, for example in different types of collage (as in Thomas
> Pynchon’s Gravity Rainbow). I must reiterate that the polyvalence—the
> almost unbonded permissiveness—of interpretation is essentially of the same
> nature as that of Rorschach tests. The viewer sees whatever is prompted to
> him by his brain’s associative effort (the results can also indicate the
> perceived aesthetic value of the Rorschach test). Through this we reach the
> conclusion that in literature readers read both what is in the work as well
> as whatever they read “into” it.
>
>
>                 [p. 112]
>
> --jel
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>