Benny's Job

[Dave Monroe]

... always neglect to get around to something in the rush.  What if said
analogies, allegories, associations, whatever, were "neither in the mind
(conscious or not) of the" commentator, poster, whatever, "nor,
demonstrably, in the language of" his/her "text?"  Again, we're reading
Pynchon here.  What if I posted in response to anything anybody ever
attributed to me, "such was not my intent"?  Which I seem to have to do,
constantly, along with "that was not what I wrote," but ... but I am
rather more forthcoming about my "intentions" than Pynchon, no?  And
rather more forthright.  Ultimately, I cannot see how the objections you
constantly mount against nigh unto anything I post allow for the
possibility of figurative language--allusion, analogy, whatever--which
is pretty much the possibilty of language at all.

This, by the way, is why I insist on noting the indeterminacy of that
opening sequence of Gravity's Rainbow, which only takes on the various
readings made of it--Pirate's dream, V-2 evacuation, concentration camp
evacuation, and so forth; readings, by the way, in my decidedly
ecumenical manner, I'm perfectly happy to admit as being all valid, all
at once, this is where I think the "genius" of those texts lies, in that
seemingly inexhaustible production of meaning (think, perhaps, if
nothing else, those virtual particles constantly flickering in and out
of the so-called "vacuum")--in relation to other apparently related
events surrounding it (the Werner von Braun epigraph before, Pirate
waking from a dream afterward, the V-2 found shortly thereafter).

Much operates in this way, not only in Pynchon's texts, but in pretty
much all literature, perhaps in all language.  One finds seeming
repetitions, resonances, echoes, and proceeds as if these are
significant.  Or perhaps even problematises them (which is still to
detect them, and grant them significance).  But one cannot ultimately
seal off the text in some seeming "New Critical" fashion from its
contexts.  I can't, at any rate, and, insofar as I was "trained," I was
trained "New Critically."  But something from the outside's gonna creep
in, and not in the least in those Pynchonian texts, with their
references to historical events and literary works and so forth which
inevitably lead to other events and works, and so forth.   Il n'y a pas
de hors-texte, non?  But of course ...

And, hey, I've got that cultural history, that New Historicism,
whatever, in me, as well, and my modus operandi of the moment is to
shuttle back and forth across that ever-so-permeable membrane betwixt
"text" and "context."  Again, no matter what else, any text cannot help
but to be about its contexts, of production, of reception.  But
"vilify," much less "damn," a reading, much less "vilify" and/or "damn"
someone for making any given reading?  When I've even bothered to
"demure," to differ, it has been "civilly," indeed, and, more often than
not, not in any explicit way, going about my own reading without having
a go at anyone else's.  Unlike some.  I'd assume this was obvious, but
...

Really, I've intended no challenge to anyone's quest to be alpha male
here, and any baring of my multicolored hindquarters is at any rate not
intended as such.  Sheesh ...