Osmosis & P's Gnostic Cosmoses

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Terrance wrote:
> 
> > What has all this to do with TRP and the American Novel,  I mean the girl
> on the bus on her way to get a nose job,  I haven't the big dust cloud over
> the
> American night of a chance of guessing at, but
> 
> Not much to do SPECIFICALLY with  V.--unless one sees Pynchon and certain
> other writers as going out of their way--in an above average manner--to call
> attention to the groundlessness of  language and writing and meaning . . .
> though perhaps, again, P has not set out to deconstruct himself (whatever we
> want to call it) but that  the  kidding around  he does so much of  just
> turns out to be one and the same thing as deconstruction without the fancy
> clothes (again, or whatever)?
> 
> Whatever and who knows???
> 
>                 P.


P certainly has a lot to say about language, writing,
meaning, being, knowing...but even if P calls attention to
D(d)econstruction or to the groundlessness of language and
writing and meaning...we can not with confidence, imho, say
that he agrees that language, writing, meaning, are
groundless or that he agrees with the project(s) of
Deconstruction or that Deconstruction's approach to his
texts is in some ways germane while other approaches are
unapt simply because he calls attention to it, even if he
and some of his contemporaries and some of his critics, all
in an above average manner, go out of their way to call
attention to it. 

But P does more than call attention to language, writing,
knowing, meaning. 

One could argue, in an above average manner, that all his
kidding around amounts to deconstructing his own text, but
one could also, in above average manner, and lots of critics
have, argue the same for lots of texts. I have provided
examples of Shakespeare's Richard I, Chaucer's Pardoner,
and  Melville's Confidence Man. 


I guess what I'm saying Paul, is that deconstruction, while
P certainly makes use of what can be identified as
deconstructing tactics, strategies, and his intentions for
doing so may be instructive, if only in that they add
another term, reverse the polarities or subvert the
logocentric blah blah blah, race, gender, all those
conditioned reader responses, conditioned constructions
of..., deconstruction is merely encyclopedic, more of P's
erudition, a strategy of his narrators and a target of his
satire. 

In GR, Slothrop has been conditioned or has inherited "the
word-smitten" Puritan's "bookish reflexes." But his reflexes
are no use to him now. His search for the Grail, the sacred
Word is anachronistically logocentric, because the "Data
behind which always, nearer or farther, was the numinous
certainty of God" is useless. (GR.242) There is an
unbridgeable gap between the sacred WORD and the ABSOLUTE.
Bring in the linguist, Stephen Dodson-Truck, deconstruct,
but the Proverbs are for Paranoids.