Difficult, Dated, Frustrating, Prophetic – Teaching Thomas Pynchon
themillions.com
themillions.com
David Foster Wallace writes (in an essay collected in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again) about the connection for him between higher math and logic and writing fiction. About the "click" that happens when things fall into place. For several years, I chased exactly that in fiction, before returning to my teenage passion for programming. I was immensely pleased to find the same "click" in software. The same challenges of world creation, of collecting, balancing and combining incongruent, contradictory and abstract thoughts in my head before committing them to screen.
What I'm suggesting is Thomas Pynchon, David Foster Wallace and, let's add, William Gass, are programmers' writers.
And that's, in its own way, _awesome_. The problem is that people take it seriously. People read the tea leaves of these chaotic texts and derive their own meaning (which means they're falling for the ruse). I have a deep problem with post modernism in literature and elsewhere because of the nature of the joke. It's a virulent meme that has made both art and literature indigestible and that's a shame.
Markets sort of win out and we get real art from television and popular entertainment these days. It's just sad that the legacy of postmodernism is a sort of flypaper trap for minds that would have been put to much better use elsewhere.
Bleeding Edge is full of laugh out louds - and possibly of some minor interest to HN.
(excuse me, I'm off to play call of duty with people who understand games are supposed to be fun not make you think.)
Which is not at all to say that the novel is not worth reading, and rereading.
"One summer afternoon, Mrs. Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary."
This is loaded with irrelevancies (full of noise) no matter what the "single thought" it is supposed to convey might be. If it's about her role as executor, why the detail about the kirsch in the fondue at the garden party? If it's about the garden party, why the anecdote about the loss of two million dollars?
And given that "profluence" is a term specifically associated with Gardner, it is no surprise that an essay that opens by discussing Gardner's opinions should use it. It doesn't mean "flow" but rather the way in which fiction actively draws us forward in a continuous waking dream.
You seem to have confused narrative fiction with program documentation.
https://litreactor.com/columns/the-benefits-of-free-indirect...
http://faculty.washington.edu/cbehler/glossary/freeindsty.ht...
That paragraph, though short, has an awful lot of information; "noise" yes, but interesting and neat observations, even elegant in their economy.
A tupperware party: Oedipa's social circle consists of housewives who lack financial independence or grand ambitions.
Too much kirsch in the fondue: the tupperware business is distinctly secondary to an excuse to get a bit drunk with friends, which tells us a bit more about her social cohort.
to find that she, Oedipa: her role in this story is thrust upon her from the very first sentence, in contrast to the the passive drift suggested above.
She supposed executrix: Oedipa is la little pendantic, not to mention well-educated, although we should already have guessed that from her upper-class name.
Pierce Inverarity: Inverarity is a remote village in Scotland (and a very nice one too; I've driven through it several times, but that won't be on the test). We may suspect that the late Mister Inverarity was a typical Scottish penny pincher...
once lost two million dollars in is spare time: ...or maybe not. This will be a whimsical story that confounds out expectations.
more than honorary: Oedipa must have a certain level of professional competence to have been selected for this task.
Besides all this, don't neglect the more poetic aspects of the language - the rhythm, alliteration, internal rhyming and shifting subjective clauses are engaging, the word combinations euphonious. I find Pynchon a pleasure to read despite the lack of plot or clear narrative motion. He has voice, bringing in sense of children's stories with their odd givens, the mild daytime drunkenness, the sense of having been selected for a task bigger than one might have chosen for oneself.
As you can guess, I'm personally rather fond of this book :)
You may as well say that a polygon is somewhat rectangular.