Benny's Job (2)

[jbor]

----------
>From: <monroe at mpm.edu>

> ... 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?"

I referred to the analogy, or analogies: cocos = gooks; Vietnamese people =
cannibal alligators; as being unapt.  And asked, what if they were not in
the author's (conscious or unconscious) mind nor, demonstrably, in the text?

> Again, we're reading
> Pynchon here.

Yes.

> What if I posted in response to anything anybody ever
> attributed to me, "such was not my intent"?

People would pretty soon stop bothering to respond, I imagine.

> Which I seem to have to do,
> constantly, along with "that was not what I wrote,"

And thus I am forced to repost the *whole* ... lot in response.

> 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).

OK, from this do I assume that an interpretation which states that Trope X
is *not* in Passage Y of the text is, in your view, an illegitimate one?
That, as Terrance will often say, the following interpretation is permitted:
"A girl chasing a rabbit through a looking glass is central to _Moby Dick_"
(please forgive the paraphrase) while an interpretation which phrases the
same statement in the negative is not?

> Much operates in this way, not only in Pynchon's texts, but in pretty
> much all literature, perhaps in all language.

Obviously not always, or infinitely, surely? So, who is drawing the lines?
And where? And why are they being drawn in just that set of shapes and
spaces?

> One finds seeming
> repetitions, resonances, echoes, and proceeds as if these are
> significant.

Yes.
You still haven't addressed the question about diametrical interpretations
("something is there" vs. "something isn't there"). And, after all, it's
just a rhetorical commonplace to reverse the positive and negative
valencies:

eg The Holocaust is central/not central ...

  The dearth of representation of the Holocaust is central/not central ...

Does it become a matter of who gets in first? This hardly seems suitable.

>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 ...
>