Pynchon's "muse" (was ...

[jbor]

----------
>From: MalignD at aol.com
>

> GR is fiction and, given the extent to which it succeeds as such, one can, I
> think, safely assume P's goals in writing it were primarily esthetic, not
> historical or pedagogic.

I'm not sure that the separation or image of competing muses is particularly
apt. This from an unpublished essay by Greg Comnes:

    "When Baumgarten coined the expression in 1735 he described Aesthetics
    as another way of knowing based on sensory experience coupled with
    feeling, in contrast to knowing based on rational "insight" that has
    since devolved into binary thought. With the linguistic turn in
    criticism, the epistemic notions of the aesthetic were shunted aside in
    favor of anti-aesthetic and anaesthetic issues, what Tom Wolfe
    derisively described as the aesthetic being reduced to "illustrations"
    for the critical text."

from: 'Unswerving Punctualites of Chance: The Aporetics of Dialogue In
William Gaddis' [Presented at the colloquium "Reading William Gaddis/Lire
William Gaddis" organized by Laboratoire Orleans-Tours de Litterature
Americaine (LOLitaA) and held at the University of Orleans, March 24-25
2000]

I think there is enough in the detail and form of Pynchon's texts to
consider them as "versions of history" which are offered to the reader, if
not indeed incorporating meditations on historiography within their scope.

best