dialectics

[People In Common]

Max pondered
>Indeed, does he have a "message" or are all of his dialectics
>always so undermining of his apparent assertions that all of his oeuvre
>amounts to a joke on the reader?  This view has its followers.

Now that's what I always suspected of the aphorisms in The Sot-Weed Factor, 
but was hardly concerned enough to cancel them out against each other and 
see.  Yea, yea, obviously it was a joke, John Barth is to a large degree an 
intellectual jester.  I don't think Pynchon is.

And I'm dubious about this use of the word dialectic.

As I understand the term, dialectics is the development and resolution of 
the (opposing) tensions in things, material and mental. It's the process, 
not the pairs of opposing assertions.  Pynchon definitely uses that 
process, but he also includes unresolved opposite views and leaves us 
readers to take which side we will, maybe to resolve them dialectically.
         I notice that Terence omits Marx and his intellectual descendents 
from his list of dialecticians.  Being of that rescension myself, I 
primarily understand the word in a political-historical, rather than 
intellectual context.  I've always found a consistency of political 
alignment in the main narrative voice in GR and find no problem identifying 
Pynchon's political sympathies from this.
         A friend, like myself of libertarian communist alignment, read GR 
for the first time a couple of years back.  It changed the way he saw the 
world, he said.  He didn't cease to be a marxist, but appreciating 
Pynchon's perceptions of things added another facet to his way of seeing.
         It is common to use the Marx as sly racist quote to distance 
Pynchon from marxism but the exchange between Wimpe and Tchitcherine 
(p701)  IMO shows him to have a fine and sympathetic understanding of 
marxist dialectics.
Message?

   How about "...and these are issues I reckon matter, and here, I've 
illustrated various aspects of them for you in  ways I think appropriate, 
and coz I dig intellectual games, I've buried a whole bunch of useful 
information for you to chew on. I've had a whole lot of fun putting it all 
together and hope you have as much following the threads.  A-and watch out 
for that minotaur."

Spencer:

>  What I am
>searching for is a reason to seek out the knowledge which the lit-crits on
>the list seem to be in possession.  The preterite will (should) always seek
>the knowledge necessary to become the elect (wether lit-crits are elect is
>up for discussion).

   There is no reason to seek out that knowledge.  Take their words and run 
with them.  The lit-crits may be better than you or I at untangling 
Pynchon's glorious tapestry, but determining the worth of each thread isn't 
something they have any monopoly on,and are just as likely as any of us to 
be right or wrong.  Another dialectic maybe...

Ciao fer now
Mike the weave