Stanislaw Lem on GRAVITY'S RAINBOW

[j e l]

ah...perhaps i'm reading Lem here too literally. if Lem was a fan maybe he
would have used the term "linguistic entropy" or better yet "narrative
entropy."

     --jel


On Wed, Aug 6, 2025 at 2:30 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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
>>
>