GRGR(4) kenosha kid

[rj]

JL:
> It's interesting, though, how the kute little 'hommages' 
> that we all seem to imagine we notice depend so much on
> ourselves while remaining such an important part of the 
> text.  How important is Intention anyway?  

cjhurtt:
> yeesh. doesnt this open up that whole personal interpretation can o' worms 
> though? there's a term for it..help me out lit-crit folk. the type of reading 
> where ANY interpretation made by a reader no matter how private and self 
> referential is valid?

But what if Pynchon's Intention is to *invite* these readings, fully
aware that such is the elusive nature of linguistic signification
anyway? Rather than too little information, as in _Godot_ say, what
Pynchon provides us with is too much information. There are too many
conclusively possible interpretations, apparently mutually exclusive
ones at that as well.

It's significant that in his truth serum episode the examiners (those
war-funded doctors in the text and we the reader *in the text* as well)
discover that Slothrop has been an associate -- the term applied rather
loosely perhaps -- of both JFK and Malcolm X. The scientists are
explicitly trying to find out about "racial problems" in the US, but, of
course, unavailed of the retrospect that we as readers possess, the
irony of the fact that they don't and can't register the profound
importance of these two names is quite marvellous.

Racial conflicts are all about what goes on on the hustings. War
technocracies are inept and ineffectual. These are the text's 'themes'.
We understand. Our belief-systems are confirmed. Those loons at 'The
White Visitation' have got the wrong guy. And, in fact, the whole
Operation Black Wing scenario as revealed a segue or two later is
nothing more than an absurd misappropriation of the war budget, as
futile a proposition as Pudding's book about the permutations of
European politics. Or is it? Pynchon is Slothrop's "chronicler" too --
self-consciously so as it is later revealed, with the reader also thus
wrongly cued in to his travails all along -- so the irony rebounds. JFK
and Mr X are where their/P's/our probes should have been and need to be
pointed. Yes? Slothrop's just a schlemiel. *We* know this. Or do we? 

In the 'magic realism' of Pynchon's text, the impossible seems to
becomes the actual: the SHAEF film of the fictional Schwarzkommandos
precedes and perhaps generates the real thing. And Slothrop does appear
to possess the key: that harmonica returns, purified and perfect, and he
*does* transcend.

The ironic comfort zone -- the reader's *control* of the text and its
significance -- is undermined over and again, and then once again.
Everything keeps slipping out of the frame, like that Sundial cartoon.
A-and, isn't it just a bit too simplistic, a bit too neat, traditionally
historical, to envisage "racial problems" in the US of A in terms of ol'
JFK and Red Mal anyway? Slothrop's subconscious and archetypal 'white
man' identification of blackness with shit and death, and buggery (what
of several critics' assertions of *Pynchon's* homophobia in _GR_?) with
the threat of reform/reversal to the ethnocentric hierarchy -- this is
perhaps the locus, the key to those "racial problems" in the US of A,
ongoing for years and years before and after this lil ol' WWII
intermezzo.

The fact that Orson Welles (arguably) and 'Bird' Parker are inserted
here are perhaps similarly reflexive gestures, in terms of what
Pynchon's doing, his literary 'style' if you like. In _Citizen Kane_
Rosebud's the sled but it's really R. Hearst's pet name for his girlie's
twat, as we've discovered, so that the significance of this (non-)symbol
bounces right out of the text into the contemporary socio-political
sphere, as an in-joke even. Everyone within the film's narrative is on
the wrong tack altogether and the viewer appears to end up with that
cozy feeling of closure, knowing what's what: Rosebud's a sled's all,
show's over, nothing more to see here foax; but at the same time feeling
somewhat deflated and unsure that that's all that it is ('DIE WELT IST
ALLES...'), having been led to believe it *was* perhaps some
all-consuming key, expecting, hoping it was so. Isn't the Kenosha Kid
this symbol as well? It both IS and ISN'T at the same time. And aren't
we doing the same things as the audience(s) of (_)Cit. Kane(_)? Thinking
we've got it all together -- our "personal interpretation" is *the* one
-- but being so wrong and never even realising it. Never.

Il n'y a pas de hors texte.

best