Will's Students -- Kelley

[Phillip P. Muth]

Dear Mr Kelley:

I must take issue with a part of your premise about Pynchon, at
least so far as one of your analogies goes.  You say that a Zen
riddle has no answer, but that simply isn't so at least not as
I see it. "The whole of Zen wages a war against the
prevarication of Meaning.  We know that Buddhism baffles the
fatal course of any assertion (or of any negation) by
recommending that one never be caught up in the four follwing
propositions: this is A--This is not A--this is both A and not
A--this is neither A nor not A" Roland Barthes Empire of
Signs.  I hope the quote's application to the possibilities of
the Tristero is obvious.
I would ask you to think more about which abstraction you want
to follow, i.e. which story you want to foreground in your own
creation of (non)meaning.  If you are after a single meaning or
even the meaning of menanings then you should think about the
value of hermeneutics to your enterprise. Isn't all
interpretation endless? Why do you want to reduce polyvalent
meanings to a stable interpretation. (the old we murder to
dissect argument).
Are you more interested in knowledge than meaning?Is Pynchon?
The search for objects of knowledge is epistimological.  Do you
need to know whether the Tristero exists or whether Oedipa is
mad, whether A is A or not?
Are your aims more suited toward teleology, toward the end and
revelation of a final meaning even if such a meaning be nothing
or death (or both and neither).
All that stuff sounds pretty highfallutin to me.  Why not just
enjoy the pleasure of the undecidability of things or the sound
of one hand clapping?
I too have given you four poles of meaning.  Is the quadrature
of the suject inescapable?  In other words is Zen a nice place
to visit, but not a place where we Westerners can live?

Parke Muth