From: fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster)
Subject: Re: A nice book to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 23:02:26 GMT

Tracy Diane Layng writes:
>In response to books I would rather listen to someone discuss, but not read
>and cross referenced under not living there, I submit for consideration
>ADA by Nabokov. All I remember about the book is that there was some fruit,
>two children, and nature. The book also had a bright yellow dust-jacket.

Nice memories--not bad for a book you didn't get into.

If you really would prefer, however temporarily, discussion of
Nabokov's _Ada_ to other forms of reading entertainment, I have a
recommendation: _The_Cosmic_Web_ by N. Katherine Hayles.  This sleek
silver paperback, subtitled "Scientific Field Models & Literary
Strategies in the 20th Century," attempts--with inevitable failures
due to the "preterite and fallen" nature of the written word (that was
supposed to be a funny)--to convey the bright sparkling web of Ms.
Hayles' understanding of how the "field concept" is deployed in
various modern novels.  Take a look at her chapter titles, and you'll
see what I'm talking about:

     Part I: Mathematical and Scientific Field Models

     Spinning the Web: Representative Field Theories and
                         Their Implications

     Part II: Literary Strategies

     Drawn to the Web: The Quality of Rhetoric in Pirsig's
                         _Zen_and_the_Art_of_Motorcycle_Maintenance_

     Evasion: The Field of the Unconscious in D. H. Lawrence

     Ambivalence: Symmetry, Asymmetry, and the Physics of Time
                         Reversal in Nabokov's _Ada_

     Subversion: Infinite Series and Transfinite Numbers
                         in Borges' Fictions

     Caught in the Web: Cosmology and the Point of (No) Return
                         in Pynchon's _Gravity's_Rainbow_

I guess it's one of those either-you-love-it-or-you-hate-it things.
For a webster like myself, such topics are notoriously seductive, and
those enchanting words about the be-netted cosmos pulled me, as if
caught in sticky tendrils I was helpless to resist, right toward the
cash register in the bookstore.

I'm reading it a chapter at a time, and am only halfway through, but
when we touched briefly, last week, on _Gravity's_Rainbow_ as a "novel
of ideas," I skipped ahead to the Pynchon chapter; and I was so amused
by clever chat about paranoid histories vs. encyclopedic narratives,
refractoriness of the text due to deliberate obliteration of pattern,
and the consolidation of stultifying control due to the expansion of
human consciousness into all of creation, I actually read it a second
time through.  I still haven't quite grasped what she means by
_preterite_, but I find Hayles to be at least as clear as a dusty
window.  In spots, such as in her analysis of the two forms of the
rainbow and the Rocket's ballistic arc, her language is crisp and
spunky.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, has anyone read Michael Polanyi?  Hayles
describes his notion of how "tacit knowledge" in science operates to
"guide the scientist to the interesting fact."  I'm intrigued enough
about the whole concept of tacit understanding, I'd like to hear more
about that.

                                                  --Fiona Webster

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