SOURCE: “Experiments in Postmodern Dialogue,” in Diacritics, Vol. 14, No. 3, Fall, 1984, pp. 52-62.

In the following review of Lyotard's Instructions païennes and Au juste, Lindsay discusses Lyotard's use of the philosophical dialogue as a device for deconstructing the authority of a centralized, universalizing narrator.

We possess a remarkable document that reflects the simultaneous birth of scientific thinking and of a new artistic-prose model for the novel. These are the Socratic dialogues.

M. M. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

1.

Near the beginning of Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, a group of allied scientists in World War II tries to come to terms with the German V-2, a sinister new rocket which, traveling faster than sound, arrives before the noise of its own approach. The V-bomb statistics chart an equation of probability on the map of London; an aging Pavlovian scientist is appalled by the nonchalance of a younger colleague, a statistician...