GR 'Streets' polysemous

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> Since it has been a while since I've perused GR, I decided to re-read Part
> 4. Like STREETS, it begins with the sound of buzzing (kazoos this time),
> after a brief airplane stunt-flight moves to gray skies for the War, heads
> right into cross imagery, has a Thunderbolt, re-introduces the harmonica,
> has Slothrop thinking of a way to get back, after a discussion of music and
> enlightenment returns to crosses and crossroads and churches, has semen
> dripping from a hanging cock onto the ground and creating capital gains,
> (Crosses, swastikas, Zone-mandalas, how can they not speak to Slothrop?),
> and the first section closes with Slothrop becoming a crossroad viewing a
> stout rainbow cock driven out of pubic clouds into green wet valleyed Earth.
> The more one reads, the more context and complexity and intertext
> referentiality one finds.

The conclusion that GR contains a variety or sequence of meanings seems
to be inescapable. It's a Modern novel. The idea of manifold meaning is
one that Modern readers have come to accept (a Modern critical ideas
that can be easily traced to theology). Several different schools of
Modern criticism, each making a different
and distinctive contribution,  had a hand in establishing the position
of the Modern novel and the Modern reader. Each school chose to examine
different Symbols (by which I mean any unit of any literary structure
that can be isolated for critical attention) in its analysis--a word,
phrase, or image used with some kind of special reference are all
symbols in this sense. 


As post-modern readers we are confronted with all of these, in part
because
there is reciprocity, an exchange, between artists and critics, between
Modern criticism and post-modern literature, and partly because as
readers of Modern and post-Modern literature we are become students of
history... tradition... primary and secondary sources...of
psychology...anthropology .... we read after the Aristotelians,
Coleridgians, Thomists,
Freudians, Jungians, Marxists, anfd after  Structuralism ...Formalism
...Feminism...Deconstructionism...blah, blah, blah ... and so we are
students of myth,
ritual, archetype, metaphor, ambiguity, irony...and so we can  either
admit that manifold meaning is a given or else chose one of these
schools or approaches and then attempt to prove that all the others are
less
legitimate. The former approach is the way to scholarship and learning,
the latter the way of pedantry. 

The centrifugal reading that attributes "nothingness" to Existentialism
is not less valid than the centripetal reading that attempts to develop
from the context and the words around the word "nothingness" a sense of
the larger verbal pattern they make. In both cases we deal with symbols,
but when we attach an external meaning to a word we have, in addition to
the verbal symbol, the thing represented or symbolized by it. Actually
we have a series of such representations: the verbal symbol NOTHINGNESS
is a group of black marks on a page representing an idea or concept that
we can recognize as Christian, Buddhist, Existential...

On important feature of MOdern literature (and of GR) is the absence of
a controlling aim of descriptive accuracy. There is no reason to expect
that Pynchon knows or should know the historical facts surrounding his
themes. There is no reason to expect that he has not or that he should
not alter them without good reason (i.e.,  to produce a symmetrical
structure).