GRGR(4)KK and "enthymeme"

[Doug Millison]

At 2:00 PM -0400 6/17/99, Paul Mackin sniped:
>Not much of a bell curve but you can tell the participants by their hat
>color. My reading is that he's giving us more than conventional pieties
>and disapproval noises. (you know, like tsk tsk tsk)
>But seriously, does anyone on the p-list believe novels can have "ultimate
>meanings?"

Sure they can. His novels have given meaning to TRP's life these past
several decades, for starters. And to quite a few readers of his books.

And some meanings do ring out pretty clearly in GR. Look at GR's strong
condemnations of genocide (Herero, dodo, Jew -- they are condemned by TRP's
shocking portrayals of the violence involved and by his depiction of the
moral and spiritual bankruptcy that follows for their perpetrators) and of
the reduction of human beings to mere factors of production (concentration
camp slaves starving to death as they manufacture A-4 rockets),  strong
affirmations of how love can hold even the evils of war at bay for awhile
(Roger and Jessica in their hideaway), and the great difficulty we have in
freeing ourselves from the many systems that enslave us (the novel
reinforces this at every level) -- the world-weary might dismiss these as
"conventional pieties" or "disapproval noises", but it's difficult to argue
that they're absent from the book, or from any of TRP's books.

To the degree that TRP encodes information in the text that has meaning for
himself or for those in on the secret -- there's another kind of "ultimate
meaning".

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