Pynchon Is A Liar

[Dave Monroe]

The question is, whose "literalism"?  And in what sense?  There's that
right-on-up-to-fundamentalist (literary, Biblical, Constitutional, whatever)
literalism, that insistence on, if not necessarily the One True Meaning, the One
Best Meaning, at any rate, which I would think is anathema to poetic, "literary"
language (at LEAST ... although did you ever notice that fundamentalists will
insist on a "literal" reading of, say, Genesis, but will proliferate astounding
acts of poetic decryption when it comes to Apocalypse?), and then there's
perhaps that realization that language, when released into the world, say, as
(but not only as) writing (and in this Plato, in the Phaedrus, was correct,
although it was a big source of anxiety for him ...), takes on a life, a spirit
of its own.  "The letter killeth but the spirit lives," yet it seems rather that
the "literal" killeth, delimiteth the "spirits" of meaning, of signification,
whatever, whilst what is often meant by the "spirit" of a letter, of a text, is
nigh unto some sort of possesion, of a particular word by a particular meaning,
of a particular text by a particular reading.  There's more than a bit of the
political about all this as well ... but me, I'm rather ecumenical about the
whole situation.  "My name is Legion" ...

s~Z wrote:

> I have found this old essay by Oscar Wilde a helpful antidote to the
> literalism running rampant in GRGR lately:
>
> http://eserver.org/books/intentions/the-decay-of-lying.html
>
> "The final revelation is that Lying, the telling of beautiful untrue things,
> is the proper aim of Art."