IG Farben & French Shakespeare.1&2

[Terrance]

MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> 
> <<... what does it mean that Pynchon names I G Farben or Jay Gould & Jim
> Fisk, J.P. Morgan, Richard Nixon, Rathenau, Dulles, JFK, Malcolm X? And what
> does it mean that he connects I G Farben to the U.S. Military Industrial
> Complex? That a screaming ICBM is come to America? >>
> 
> Well, precisely.  What does it mean, outside the value of the artistic
> juxtapositions within the novel?  The reader may have an answer, but it's
> entirely the reader's own.

Are all answers the reader's own? I want to understand your
position here, your aesthetic and perhaps soicial-political
theory about art and reading.  Is it that the text is empty,
awaiting the content that only a reader, a particular
reader, at a particular time,  can pour into it? Since I am
arguing that the reader of your generation, having read the
book when it was published may have valuable insights that
we should not discount or dismiss, obviously I do not hold
that the reader is a tabula rasa sitting passively awaiting
the imprint of the author's letters. At the same time I do
not think that the text is a Rorschach test or simply black
marks on a page bound and labeled a novel or a poem or a
comic book. Why even dispute the reading of any other reader
if they are all so subjective, idiosyncratic, entirely the
reader's own? Again, I'm not sure what your position is.