From: Lane
Category: Amis
Date: 9/6/99
Time: 1:22:18 AM
Remote Name: 24.48.53.43
All this talk of Pynchon has stirred up some of my conternimous grad school Pynch/Amis theories.
Entropy, for those of you, and surely zelnik, who are aquainted w/ruggles, is a hackneyed topic; however, in regs. to our melifilous maestro, MA, who has been writing on/from the a-bomb, universal cause p-o-v, the ENTROPY (typing those caps was in iteslf an act of, as was typing this notation of my typing the caps--make it stop mommy!) clock, by which we live, has largely remained unwound.
Amis' main characters are always personality's of impersonation--i.e. the constant pomo writing of writing--who act as switchboards of various discurive frameworks, where returns to real are impossible, and personalities are impossible because they entail a deflection into cultural space, a dynamic that puts every utopia of return to stable origins and meaning under erasure, because every meaning one could attach to Amis characters is hopelessly deferred. This affords Amis to write from the muse, the poetic prose which is oh so nonpragmatic, a purely self-reflexive system of notation that arouses prose from its slumber as signs. Signs, and not original vocation of orders, adds a bumper crop of textual stength, but creates an entropy because it becomes a space in which the signifiers and signified can operate without the interference of a stable meaning simply in play of constant differences. In an informational society where information is ubiquitous, information itself becomes entropic because it always implicated by a surplus of information, behavorial utility. Constantly, in Amis' fiction, we see the subject being himself as an outside life, partaking of the death instinct or information instinct (synonomous here) which allows them the register of life. From this position, the subject participates in the entropy of language--a closed and binary language-- where the biological relation to death is always filtered through language and operative in biology. The death drive is always more complex than the dynamic of referntial operatives, because, although language is iteself always negentropic, as is death, it is inevitably entropic because it opens the possibilty of communication. It is this comminication where desire attempts to be defined, and, desire can never be satisfied because such satisfication would amount to total information, total death, backhole entropy.From Rachel to Night Train, the obvious text in text, to the control of information, it's all a period costume of highly brilliant fabric.
btw--addendum to my cuff list of poetic novels: A Sister to Scheherazade, by Assia Djebar--a truly amazing novel.