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sentences. This was widely employed in the trilogy of novels starting
with
The Soft Machine
64
of
1961
, and followed by
The Ticket That
Exploded
65
of
. These topics are
possibly some of the most cogent expressions of a world saturated
with media and information. In these works, and for Burroughs in
general, language is a virus that perpetuates itself through the mass
media, a situation he both articulates and resists through the use
of technologies such as tape recording and techniques such as the
cut-up. Burroughs has been hailed as prefiguring many postmod-
ernist literary concerns, in particular his focus on language and
indeterminacy and his refusal of the traditional role of author, as
well as producing Cyberpunk novels,
avant la lettre
.
If Burroughs's work prefigures the postmodern narrative then
that of Thomas Pynchon exemplifies it. Pynchon is in a sense the
archetypical American postmodern novelist. His novels are vast,
hermetic texts, dense and difficult to read and full of hidden refer-
ences, heterogeneous modes of writing and an almost total absence
of stable meaning. Even Pynchon's famous invisibility, equalled
only by that of J. D. Salinger, adds to his impeccable postmodern
credentials. He has been hailed by a number of critics as a writer
deeply engaged with questions of Cybernetics, systems and infor-
mation.
67
The two topics that best exemplify Pynchon's concerns
in this area are
The Crying of Lot
1962
and
Nova Express
66
of
1964
49
68
and
Gravity's Rainbow
.
69
The former, mercifully short by Pynchon's standards, concerns the
attempts of the main character Oedipa Maas to make sense of the
real-estate holdings of her ex-lover Pierce Inverarity. In her journey
to discover the truth about his business affairs she undergoes a
number of strange adventures, and uncovers bizarre underground
conspiracies, including the existence of an alternative postal system,
which has operated against the state monopolies throughout history.
It is through this device and others, such as Oedipa's identification
of the town of San Narciso, home of the mysterious Yoyodyne
Corporation, as a kind of printed circuit, that, according to Fredric
