Oedipus Rex & private eye my anal

[Terrance]

The question is not what distinguishes fact from fiction since we have
agreed to agree that all texts are fictions including Pynchon's Foreword
to Orwell's _1984_, 
The question is: 

What kind of fiction is the Foreword? 

Is it detective fiction? 

What if we compare and contrast the logistic method of Sherlock Holmes
with the Analytical method of Dupin with the paranoid/anti- paranoid
method of Oedipa? 

Only another provisional hypothesis slouching? 

Proverbs? provisional hypothesis? Schematics? Hermeneutic circle jerk? 

It's a simple question. And it's worth considering. 

What kind of fiction is the Foreword? 

This is not the **wrong ** question to ask. No one (certainly not THEY)
has  me asking the **wrong question.**  

It's a good question and it can be answered. Paul M. had no problem
answering it. 
Is it a question that we need to ask or answer? No. 

However, if we are really involved in analysis here, there  is simply no
reason
why we need to close out certain questions because they are the
**wrong** ones to ask. 

Analysis is useful to the literary critic. Aristotle is the "father" and
"author" of the analytic method in literary criticism and other arts and
sciences as well. 

And the Genre approach is not so easily tossed away in favor of
questions that some new Turn (semantic Turn) chooses to ask about the
sam old questions, like, 

How do we know (a semantic formulation of the  epistemological question
that was all the rage in the first phase of Hellenistic philosophy.  

Analysis can also be used to order a work of fiction. 

So can Opposition, agon, or conflict. 
I think P's writings are all ordered by conflicts unresolved. 

Sort of the opposite, but not quite, of the dialectal method. 


As Paul N has been talking about the oppositions in the P's Foreword, 
I'm rather fascinated by the prospect of discovering how oppositions
work in a new Pynchon writing using an analytical method. I've used an
analytical method to read all of Pynchon's texts. 

Analysis can only be the **wrong** method  if one contends that only
homo-textual readings are possible. 

Analysis seems to cut across the grain of P's project: analysis is not a
progressive knotting into, but rather an disentanglement from. 

P's texts are not ordered analytically, but analysis can be used to
order works of fiction. 


Plots, then, are plots of discovery. 

Plots proceed from an unsettled or indeterminate situation to its
resolution through a discover of how all the elements fit together. 

The Classic example (as P obviously realized), and BTW, it is the
Classical example because of its interpretation by Aristotle, os
Sophocles' _Oedipus Rex_

The initial situation is unsettled because of the plague whose cause is
unknown, and it is resolved by Oedipus the riddle-solver solving the
riddle of himself.

Of course, in the 20th century, the riddle-solving, like sex, is done on
paper. 
And the riddle, is not solved, it's only diddled. 

Play, 

T