The Quest in Post-Modern Fiction (Extra Credit Post)

    Within the first few pages of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close I was reminded of Oedpia's questing in The Crying of Lot 49, as well as, even more explicitly, of the detective work in Paul Auster's very post-modern novel, City of Glass. The game that Oskar and his father played, "Reconnaissance Expedition" in which even the possibility that "no clues is a clue," of course mirrors Oskars larger search throughout the novel (8). However, more than that, I feel that it also parallels the quests that characters from many of the novels we've looked at this semester go through, including the narrator in Kingston's The Woman Warrior, Jack Gladney in White Noise, and, of course, Oedipa. In all of these situations the characters are forced not only to search for clues to help them on their quest for knowledge, but also consider what exactly constitutes a "clue." Through all this, these novels bring to the fore the very post-modern concern of how our knowledge of the world works, and whether it provides any real value.
    Toward the end of The Crying of Lot 49, Oedipa interrogates herself as to how much she has actually learned on her quest, and about what might actually be at the center of everything. At one point she muses that a plot might have been mounted against her, "so expensive and elaborate, involving items like the forging of stamps and ancient books," among countless other things (141). Here she considers at length all the supposed clues she's found on her search, wondering to what extent they hint at a real plot, to what extent they're just a meaningless collection of objects and observations, and to what extent she is simply "out of [her] skull" (141). On this quest for knowledge, it is completely impossible for her to eliminate possible explanations for what she's found- she's no further along than she was when she began. This reminds me of Oskar's complaint to his father early in Foer's novel, he says "But if you don't tell me anything, how can I ever be right?" to which his father replies, "Another way of looking at it would be, how could ever be wrong?" (9). Both Pynchon and Foer seem to be getting at something similar here. Regardless of the amount of questing and searching for knowledge these characters do (and it's possible these are supposed to hint at broader statements about knowledge in general), there's no way for them to confirm their findings (or in Oedipa's case, that she isn't crazy) without some form of external confirmation that they will never get. Instead, they are stuck forever in the land of the "excluded middles" or "bad shit" as described by Pynchon, never able to fully decide (150).
    This is also manifested constantly in Delillo's novel, especially for the character of Jack Gladney. For instance, we see him searching for answers about Dylar, never actually finding real answers. In fact, even the ending of the novel, in his meeting with Mr. Grey, we're left to wonder if the pill was ever backed by legitimate science, or if it was just a hoax that Babette accidentally got involved in. More on the level of detail, even when Jack is doing boilerplate research about the drug, the answers seem to constantly elude him. This is, of course, exemplified in part by the fact that the woman who he believes holds the answers for him, Winnie Richards, is so elusive. Even when he does finally find her and get her to investigate the pill, she's unable to provide him with anything close to a definitive answer.
   All in all, it seems that many of the novels that we've read this semester deal pretty explicitly not only with the idea of a quest for knowledge, but with the idea that that quest might be ultimately futile. They introduce the idea in their various ways a type of double bind of knowledge. In the first place, it seems impossible to confirm anything without outside confirmation. However, this is undercut by the fact that any and all so-called "external" knowledge must necessarily be filtered by our own subjective experience of it. To return to Oskar's complaint: we can't be sure whether what we've found is a "clue," if we've just tried to impose meaning on it in order to make it a clue, or, even if we can confirm that it's a "clue," if it's actually true or useful.