Earticle

초록

영어

The purpose of this paper is to discuss how narrative language interacts with the real in The Crying of Lot 49. Protagonist Oedipa Maas encounters the word “Trystero” in describing as a center to the interwoven references that yield themselves as signifiers in Oedipa's search for revelation. Randolph Driblette lashes out against the basic assumption that words have meaning, undermining our very notions of what constitutes literature, textuality and signification. The novel seems to undermine its ontological status as literature and its privilege as a text. Pynchon goes beyond the self-referentiality of discourse and of elements of form, the vocabulary of narrative, what it signifies and what it communicates. We could still say that the novel has a plot, setting and characters, and that some of its major thematics are communication, religion, selfhood. We could also assume that the novel belongs to the traditions of quest narratives, and that Pynchon's novel is made up of words and uses narrative techniques like parody, simulacrum, and decentering. Narrative parody is a perfect postmodern form, and so it paradoxically incorporates and challenges that which it parodies reconsideration of the notion of originality that is compatible with other postmodern interrogations. Pynchon's novel deprives us of the orgasmic revelation which it half promises, half denies, not in a flirting manner, engaging us in a courtship game, but site of her failure to communicate with Maxwell's Demon, the novel itself seems to yield up narrative clues which the reader compulsively follows, only to be confronted at the end with the failure of reading. To the methods of reading and criticism which pursue the past modernist literature, the work of postmodernist writers is almost ambiguous and uncertain. The Crying of Lot 49 is beyond traditional criticism, as well as about the inutility of such criticism. Oedipa encounters the word Trystero in a literary work, and she seeks the help of a literature professor to promise that will not be fulfilled her desire in another alluring song of the Sirens. There can be no revelation about the muted post horn, the Trystero, or W.A.S.T.E. except on the unbridgeable outside, beyond the epistemological end of knowledge. The trinity of mystery at the center of the novel is a void, an emptiness, a promise of logos, a substitute center of structure. The novel has exploded itself. What remains exposed at the end is the failure of the positivism that informs reading and interpretation in their effort to make sense of the text. Pynchon suggests these different ways of thinking about how language interacts with the real world.

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 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 송태정 [ Taejeong Song | 대불대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학21 [English21]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1738-4052

• 수록기간

  1967~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 820