first, a word on the delillo short short, which i thought was quite brilliant. delillo challenges hierarchies of what are important human actions, and democratizes these actions by sandwiching “killing a roach” between “conteplating an abortion” and “romantic love.” this is an extremely liberating feeling for the reader because it semiotically challenges the “natural” priviliging of “love” and “abortion” over having, say, “roast beef and mashed potatoes.” of course, reading this short simply as a satiric take on what we would call now a “made-for-tv-movie” is fine, as are the infinite other ‘readings’ of this story.
second, and related, is the question of whether pynchon is saying a whole lot of nothing or a grand something. the main plot of the story is whether oedipa can grasp any firm solid truth. throughout, i felt that pynchon revealed the real ‘truths’ about the san narciso (and thus american) landscape, that, however, his characters were never able to grasp. the recurring imagery of drinking, eating, and smoking human bones, the smog, the electronic circuitry of city planning, the two towering missiles that decorated the yoyodyne building. at once, this landscape seems both threatening and benign, as the characters gloss over these realities in a frenzied and confused search for higher truths. pynchon’s careful use of adjectives like ‘gossamer’ (41) and ‘dross’ (76) indicate what we talked about in the first class: that the postmodern american landscape is a glossed over surface, with no depth, nothing of substance.
jameson is describing this “break” in history, when things began to lose their depth, their modernist meaning, and he discusses painting, photography, architecture, and cartogrpahy, among other things. new manifestations of cultural production in these areas are simply images, that have lost their link to old world meaning. where the two missiles at the entrance of yoydyne no longer signify war, crisis, or death, but rather serve as a garnish to an already inundated militaristic landscape, such as a dandelion would garnish a delicious glass of human bone aged dandelion wine.