Suggestions & Digressions

[Terrance]

Yes, thanks John Baily and Michael Perez and all. Is it 
infinite ingress that makes us so digress? Knotting in we go
not talking of Botticellio. 

I don't think it's presumptuous or dogmatic to suggest, even
to provide an axiom as Malign has: 

"I'm offering up as an axiom (which you need not accept)
that one 
can't properly serve two muses, let alone three."

BTW, In Ulysses Stephen says he has three masters.   

And 

"Thus, the corollary:  GR's  success as art precludes its
being written for other purposes." 

Malign is not coming out of some strange and unknown
country. Faulkner and Nabokov are his examples. 

Again, I turn to Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, where in
laying out his concepts,    
"applied author" and "implicit reader" (concepts I will
apply to Pynchon) he surveys the "rules" for writing
fiction. In Chapter 3, "All Authors Should Be Objective,"
Booth address Maligns axiom. 

[[[To succeed in writing some *kinds* of works, some
novelists find it necessary to repudiate all intellectual or
political causes. Chekov does not want himself, AS ARTIST,
to be either liberal or conservative.  Flaubert, writing in
1853, claims that even the artist who recognizes the demand
to be a "tripple-thinker," even the artist who recognizes
the need for ideas in abundance, "must have neither
religion, nor country, nor social conviction." Unlike the
claim to complete neutrality, this claim will never be
refuted, and it will not suffer from shifts in literary
theory or philosophical fashion. Like its opposite, the
existentialist claim of Sartre and others that the artist
should be totally  engagé, its validity depends on the kind
of novel the author is writing.]]] RF.70-71

Booth provides lots of examples, including Swift's
Gulliver's Travels and Dante's Divine Comedy, but this goes
to the Genre argument I will make later so...


If one cannot derive a dogmatic ethical system (I am not
going to argue that P is a moralist) one can identify
characteristic themes and ethical direction in P's fiction.
Once the "applied author" of GR has been identified, we can
turn to specific examples, say Marvey (justice?), and make
more sense of them. We can make more sense of P's use of
books like Sasuly, of his David Seed Letter and his use of
the Herero articles, of the connection he makes from IG
Farben to the US, from Nazis to Civil Rights, and so on, and
perhaps my comments will not make the eyes of Malign glass
over, once the Freudian/Technology and Sodomy/State
symbolism is credited to the "applied author" and not
entirely this readers own prejudices, views of race
relations in America unformed or naive.