Chasing ... Cutting

[MalignD at aol.com]

<<The fall of the crystal palace is not an allusion to the start of the 
holocaust but to the end of the second industrial revolution.>>

I don't know who posted this and I'm not going back to find out, but this is 
idiocy.  It speaks only to your (whoever you are) own lack of 
vision/knowledge/ imagination/whatever to believe that artists work from the 
same "this, not that" way of thinking that you do.  Using my own imagination 
for a moment, I find it not believable, whatever his original intentions, 
that Pynchon might have missed the Crystal Palace/Kristallnacht 
correspondence.  And other correspondences:  it has been noted before, by me 
and other posters, the similarities, perhaps echoes, of the opening of Bleak 
House in the opening of GR.  (James Joyce once wrote a letter to Harriet 
Weaver describing (convincingly) seven interpretations of a mere nine words 
in Finnegans Wake.)

And even if Pynchon did miss the correspondence, no matter.  Separate from 
what Pynchon himself intended, if the opening passage evokes the Holocaust 
for even one reader (even one as unimaginative and dogmatic as Millison), 
then it evokes the Holocaust.  It is a question of poetics; the words, 
written, are free to the interpreting reader.  

Similarly, someone (else?  I'm not going to look it up) wrote:  

<<In regards to Pynchon's "texts" and how to read them -- like I told 
Richard, 
the only way to read Pynchon is how Pynchon himself intended the text to be 
read.>>

Pynchon's intentions are irrelevant to the reader.  Pynchon's intentions 
don't lie between the covers of his novels.  They need not and they do not 
trouble or persuade me and they need not any other reader.