Just the place for a Snark! I have said it thrice:
What I tell you three times is true.
David Auerbach’s review of Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge introduces (to me, at least) three structural motifs in reading this book, and Pynchon: the dynamo; the idyll; the decoherence event. —Each is a response to the irreality of the real, the fundamental meaninglessness of it all, call it what you will: our paranoia positing (and fomenting) actual and imagined dynamos, frantically striving for some sort of order; the idylls our dreams, those high-water marks we can see with the right kind of eyes, both the aims of and threatened by the dynamos; the decoherence event lying necessarily in wait, to tumble whatever houses of cards either might toss up, almost by accident. (Go, read; I’m seeing it with veiled eyes, and he says it better, and anyway there’s diagrams. Go.)
I’m seeing it with veiled eyes because I couldn’t help but sketch out another map on onionskin, lay it over this, and hold them both up to the light: Clute’s triskelion, his three modes of organizing fantastika as responses to the all-swallowing world storm:
- Science Fiction begins with the novum, the new thing, proceeds through cognitive estrangement on its way to a conceptual breakthrough, and ends up in some topia somewhere, in the eye of the storm perhaps, or somewhere through it, past it, beyond;
- Fantasy, as noted, begins in wrongness, proceeds through thinning, has a moment of recognition, and then returns by turning away from the world storm;
- and Horror, which begins with a sighting, then thickens about our protagonists until it can revel in the moment when we cannot look away, and leaves us shivering in its aftermath.
Or: the dynamo; the idyll; the decoherence effect.
Anyway. —There’s all manner of means whereby this conjoint model goes wrong (distinctions between ends and means but the first of them); still. The hairs stood up, on the back of my neck.
