Prosthetic Paradise(2) Enfetishment&MS

[Michael Perez]

Paul wrote:
"I was following along nodding my head up to the part about challenging
reader's beliefs--then I thought, while there may be such a challenge
there to SOME readers, wouldn't the more usual case be that readers
will not so much  have their 'beliefs' challenged or contradicted but
rather their knowledge bases and imaginations. Don't GR readers tend to
go in with a fairly strong set of social concerns and values already
pretty well firmly entrenched?  The book will do little to challenge or
contradict these. There is too much of a commonality in moral sense
among readers and writers of literary fiction for this not to be the
case I would certainly think. Therefore the proper reward for reading P
is not having moral ideas acknowledged and proclaimed. Rather it is the
continual turning on their heads (and then back upright again) of all
thousands of ideas we cherish and firmly hold so dear. It is not a
moral exercise but an esthetic one."

Well put.  This is essentially what I had meant, but I said so a bit
more clumsily, I suppose.  I wanted to somehow address a reader's
possible preconceived notions of morality in general, not that Pynchon
was trying to sway us to one moral camp or another or that GR would
turn anyone into a born-again Pynchhead.  My choice of "challenge" as
well as my previous choice of "indeterminacy" were the result of haste.


Michael
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