GR 'Streets' polysemous

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> >>>The conclusion that GR contains a variety or sequence of meanings seems
> to be inescapable. It's a Modern novel.<<<
> 
> It's a Modern novel that meets Nabokov's criterion for a good novel.
> Regardless of what anyone has to say about this or that, the hairs on the
> back of my neck are once again erect, and my spine is tingling.


A fairy tale. There are good reasons why so many of the words we use to
describe modern novels  (fairy tale, fable, myth, fiction) have a sense
of untruth. A poet, particularly an American poet, is a liar. But a
novel is not a lie. Not if when we look for meaning (say, of
Nothingness) we look inward. Outward meanings are secondary because
novels don't pretend to assert or explain or describe, and hence are not
true, not false, not history lessons, not political propaganda. Literary
meanings are hypothetical, and a hypothetical or assumed relationship to
the external world is merely imaginative. 
IN a novel like GR, questions of fact or truth are subordinated to the
primary literary aim--to tingle the spine and produce a structure of
words for it's own sake. ANd the sign-values of symbols are subordinated
to their importance as a structure of interconnected motifs. 

Does Poetry (novels) still Delight and Instruct? 
What tingles the spine, what delights, is prior to what instructs. This
is often lost in the translation here, the annotation, the explication,
criticalization....
The reality principle is subordinate to the pleasure principle. And yet,
we are constantly reading what it is Pynchon says or asserts or what the
text tells us or thinks or what its attitude is. 

It's very odd that these kinds of critical attitudes are so pervasive in
the Pynchon Industry. You would think that the Saintly Rats in V. would
have discouraged such readings, but it seems that critics of that
generation that dominates the Industry can not accept that there are
Saintly Rats in V. So why do they find pleasure in reading it? Such
critics can not distinguish fact from fiction, and belong to the same
category as the people who send money to TV stations to help their TV
heroes out of a financial jam. Such literal minded readers should be
pitied, for they are not literal at all, but suffer from imaginative
illiteracy.