Stanislaw Lem on GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

[Mark Kohut]

A metaphorical use of “collage” to mean pasting all of the styles of
modernism together, from realism , thru indirect discourse, thru Nixon
kinda actually speaking and everything in between?

On Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 5:14 AM Erik T. Burns <eburns at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
> >
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>