answering jody Re: pynchon-l-digest V2 #1582

[Terrance]

Doug Millison wrote:


Can GR support multiple interpretations, even
> interpretations that vary wildly, even mutually exclusive
> interpretations?  There's a library of books and articles that
> demonstrate that fact.

While it's true that there is a library full of
interpretations, many mutually exclusive, mutually
incompatible, many interpretations begin with one aspect,
say film, or time, or love-death, or are generated from a
specific critical theory , and thus fail to account for the
texts mutifariousness and moreover, most interpretations
comment on selected passages, specific extracts and fail to
account for other passages that contradict them.

One would need to write a Michael Prettyplace 14 volume set,
not on King Kong but on GR to account for all the
contradictions. 
Than again,  we have discussed McHale, and those other two
critics M&M, and Pearce, Mackey, Levine, I can't remember at
the moment, but there are two
dozen or so critics that apply Barthes, then there are some
that apply Lodge and other theories, my favorites being
those that apply Bakhtin, Menippean Satire, or Frye,
Mendelson's Encyclopedia, which has generated replies from
several others. 

However, where these critics contradict one another, the
text, GR,   although full of contradictions and unsolved
mysteries, fragmented, and so on, provides, in most
instances, solutions to these critical disagreements. You
have made a good case Doug. The Holocaust is not absent from
GR. However, now that no one here, not jbor, not me, is
claiming that the Holocaust is absent from GR, the argument
is not a matter of its presence but why it is present, to
what purpose, to what extent, Is it theme, a motif, a
metaphor? How does the
presence of the Slave Labor, the marriage scene function in
the text? Also, Crownshaw doesn't make the same case you
seem to be making here. Does he? 

Also, why is the issue of how an artists might "legitimately
appropriate historical instances of trauma, and in
particular how Pynchon manages to do this in GR, 
without being guilty of exploiting the trauma in a way that
could be  considered offensive" on the table? ( I took your
sentence
because it's so much better than anything I could come up
with ;-)

Not a five minute walk from the house that TRP grew up in is
Holocaust sculpture that would offend no one in their right
mind. It's good to remember that TRP was born in 1937, he
grew up where the largest urban Jewish community lived, 1.75
million Jews lived in NYC's five Counties, Westchester and
Long Island. Also, after the War, Jews moved into the area
in huge numbers. In TRP's Town, several large Temples and
Catholic churches were built during his youth. 

In MMV, P introduces his first Irish Catholic Jew Jesuit(
Joyce, talk about Anxiety and
Influence) and here in V. we have more of the same. Why? 

Also, for the best essay on all this, See, believe it or
not,  Santayana's essay on Dante.