IG Farben & French Shakespeare.2

[Lear's Fool]

Yes, a fool's game, but there more in P than a postmodernist
instruction on the reading process. What about Love and
Death and Technology? 

Freud and his Psychoanalytic theories and concepts,
including,  Sex, aggression, and self-preservation, fathers
and mother, stages of sexual development, are all twisted
into Pynchon's encyclopedic orgy here. Pynchon does not
simply apply Sigmund Freud or Carl Gustav Jung or J.P.
Sartre, or Herbert Marcuse or Norman O. Brown. Pynchon
combines  theories and concepts, biography, history,
politics, science and technology myths, allusions, comedy
and tragedy, to satirize the state of the West and admonish
the Americans in particular. Pynchon is no moral relativist
spinning webs of complexity to delight and not instruct. .
Is there something didactic, instructive, here? Well, some
say Pynchon is instructing the reader: Instructing us on how
to read postmodern fiction. I think Pynchon does not so much
 turn the mirror from Nature to Reading (some S&M reader
author relationship), but as instruction, albeit by taking
the reader into the fun house, a  carnivalized and mirrored
world of human behavior,  to satirize, and instruct, and
present his moral position.   Humorous (cK)ute
(cK)orresepondences disruptive and subversive (for example,
Slothrop--Anubis, Osiris, Orpheus,  phallus, Freud, Jonah) 
are not simply calling attention to themselves here, but
rather indicative of Pynchon's distrust of the human
tendency ("fatally fallen"/doubly post-lapsarian)  to
establish systems that reduce "pornographically" perceptual
differentiation ("paranoia) by repressing and by denaturing
Nature and Humanity in the process. On a social level  this 
leads to a repressive technocratic system, a total and
totalizing System won away from the entropies of lovable but
scatter-brained mother earth. Mothers and Fathers, Family
surrenders to the state, and the state is an incestuous
sodomizing system in love with Death.

Anticipating the critical arguement: 


Brian McHale,  claims, "nearly everything is lost in the
translation. From first to last the reader's experience
proves that GR will not boil down quite so readily to
intelligible patterns of theme, or indeed to any of the
patterns which we have learned to expect from Modernist
texts." 

This claim would seem to undermine most studies of GR. 
Privileged? Any study that takes up, say, how pornography
functions in GR, or
religion or politics, or entropy,  comedy, satire,
paranoia,  or any part of the "indeterminate whole" is a
"(mis)reading" since any partial study depends
on prior assumptions concerning the central meaning of the
literary artifact. Critics that take this position assert
that the sum of the parts cannot be compared to the
indeterminate whole and  or that GR lacks a central subject
(vehicle) or even a hierarchy of subjects and it moves from
place to place without reason or purpose. 

All attempts to reconstruct are not going to work. Why?
Because GR destabilizes, among other things,  "novelistic
ontology." And "novelistic ontology" (the mirror-from Plato
to Postmodernism-- is turning) is an element where the
"conditioned readers" of Modernist
texts generally found their point of view. So, looking back,
with, for example, McHale's  way of looking at it,
while the pre-Modernist text would permit a reconstruction
through
mediation of an omniscient and usually a more or less
reliable narrator, Modernism complicated reconstruction by
employing narrators with a limited point of view or even
rendering them imperceptible. What's more, unreliability was
limited to the "fictive world" and was of an
"epistemological" rather than "ontological" nature, still
allowing for the reconstruction of an external fictive
reality. McHale's argument claims that in the Modernist
novel, where several mediating consciousness were
introduced,  "triangulation", that is, the movement from one
consciousness to another through coordinates in the 'real'
visible, audible, tangible, etc. remained relatively
stable, but in GR, the narrator disorientates the  reader of
pre-Modernist texts and the "conditioned" modernist reader,
since "triangulation" in GR does not permit the
reconstruction of the 'real' situation in which the contents
of one mind are accessible to another. Paradigm shift! 

Questions: 

How can a subversion of the narrative succeed without being
itself internally organized in certain ways? 

How can GR break the modernist rules without stating them
implicitly?


As David Lodge sez, "if postmodernism really succeeds in
expelling the idea of order (whether expressed in metonymic
or metaphoric form) from modern writing, then it would truly
abolish itself, by destroying the norms against which we
perceive its deviation." 


Is GR, in Barthe's terms, "beyond criticism altogether?

Beyond interpretation?

GR is still a book, words organized on pages, and if the
number of signifieds is potentially infinite, the number of
singnifiers is not. 


If interpretation is possible isn't it necessary that a text
provide
us with some indication as to which meanings are permitted
and which may be excluded?

 Can a reader of GR  determine how Pynchon's narrative
intricacies are internally motivated? 

Are we to understand them as mimetic reflections of the
complexities of the modern or postmodern
world or as particular intellectual assumptions implicit in
the narrative? 

Turn the mirror away from reading and back to writing for a
moment. 

Writing, David Lodge says, "especially writing of narrative,
is a process of constant choice and decision making: to make
your hero do this rather than that, to describe the action
from this angle rather than that. How can one decide such
questions except in terms of some overall design--which is
in some sense a design upon one's putative reader."

Lodge also notes, that it is in particular comedy which
"offers most resistance to post-structualist esthetics."