Abstract
What next? If the dualities in Gravity’s Rainbow match — link and annul — along the lines of the equations or relations we have just been describing, what might be the terms of a critical rhetoric that addresses the texts of Pynchon? That is to say, given the model of Gravity’s Rainbow, how might we proceed to write about the ways the dualities are deployed in his other books? — or indeed about any relation between two or more texts, or pieces of text? And every piece of text by our reckoning is always at least dual — for, as long as we are writing, that relation will fall within the context of a rhetorical, or post-rhetorical one.
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Notes
The Crying of Lot 49 (New York/London: Bantam Books/Jonathan Cape, 1967). J. Derrida, The Post Card, trans. A. Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Page references appearing in parentheses in this chapter are from these editions.
See D. Wills’ ‘Post/Card/Match/Book/Envois/Derrida’, Substance, 43 (1984), pp. 19–38.
See D. Wills, ‘Prosthesis: an introduction to textual artifice’, Southern Review, 17, 1 (1984), pp. 59–67; and ‘Post(e(s)’, in E. Grosz et al. (eds), Futur*Fall: Excursions into Postmodernity (Sydney: Power Institute Publications, 1986), pp. 146–58. In these articles, the text of theory and criticism is called upon to treat with the interventions of a story of a father’s wooden leg. Prosthesis will be the subject of a future study by David Wills.
David Bennett makes some important observations concerning the use of the term ‘parody’ to characterise readings of the (post)modern novel. The discussion which follows owes much to those observations. See D. Bennett, ‘Parody, postmodernism, and the politics of reading’, Critical Quarterly, 27, 4 (1985), pp. 27–43. Parody and its relations to postmodernism are also treated — we think less successfully — by McHale and Quilligan. See B. McHale, Postmodernist Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), pp. 144–5; and M. Quilligan, The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).
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© 1990 Alec McHoul and David Wills
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McHoul, A., Wills, D. (1990). Pls Record Book Bid Lot 49 Stop J Derrida. In: Writing Pynchon. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20674-2_3
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