Prosthetic Paradise (was Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1012

[rj]

TF:
> An approach that can comfortably accommodate all other
> approaches is sometimes called Pluralism

Whatever labelled box you want to stick it in is fine. It is a
descriptive approach to the way literary communication operates (rather
than a prescriptive one, which virtually all of the others you list
are.)

> When you say,
> "reclaiming the reader's privilege," this includes the
> reaction against New Criticism, I assume, both its aesthetic
> theories and the social-political implications

Yes.

> This approach results NOT in
> an infinite multiplicity of personal readings or views, but
> results in a multiplicity of independent and impersonal
> disciplines.

I don't understand this distinction. It seems to be obfuscation.

> I think the heart of
> our disagreement is not simply how a text may be viewed, but
> the primacy of the reader and the act of reading and or
> interpreting a text.

I think a lot of it has to do with the terms we use, fugitive
definitions and conceptions -- you know, the ambivalence of
word-as-text. "Reader", for example, is a term which I also apply to the
author of the text. Pynchon "reads" history (and in this case I mean
written histories) as well as antecedent fictions such as *Moby Dick* 
or *Mumbo Jumbo*, through his own text. 

> (some award the reader the reflected glory of
> duplicating the author's creativity)

(while others continue to conflate literary creativity with divine
Creation)

> When I say Pynchon insists that
> humans should not be treated as machine parts, as means to
> an end, as slaves, I am offering my opinion, I insist that
> Pynchon insists.

I'm saying that Pynchon is not a polemicist in the sense you imply here.
His fiction can be read as insisting this, as you do, but that is purely
the individual reader's prerogative, not the unalloyed intention of the
text.

> This is a rather bold statement and I don't think it at all
> fair or accurate

I'm not sure which statement you are referring to. "Attacking"?! Not
"fair or accurate"?! Surely you are the one being pejorative here?
Where's your rebuttal?

> Tools and machines differ in the degree of independence of
> operation from the skill and motive power of the operator:
> the tool lends itself to manipulation, the machine to
> automatic action.

It is a spectrum rather than a clear-cut distinction, I think.

> A hammer is a tool, a printing press is a
> machine.

In both cases they are just inanimate lumps of wood and metal until they
are used (by humans).

> what would be an example of a machine
> using a man? 

I accept that machines do not possess agency, except in Asimov's fiction
and the like, but you are quite obstinately sticking to this narrow
definition of the word "use" when, clearly, this is not the claim which
has been made.

best