Pynchon and fascism

[Paul Nightingale]

I'm not quite sure I want to get dragged into a post-mortem. Nonetheless
I'll comment briefly (but I guess these things are relative) on
Terrance's post. He wrote:

> 
> Your analytical method, is analysis in the sense of INQUIRY.

Well OK. No argument here. But if this is so, I'm not sure I accept the
following point ...

> Inquiry,
> solves problems.

Inquiry might aim to address the appropriate problems (ie which
questions to ask). By itself it solves nothing. Indeed, P's writing is
about endless inquiry, any number of interweaved, endless inquiries that
never reach their goal. But shucks, Homer, I guess you're right, that
last bit is interpretation + scare-quotes, after all. And as such
nothing at all to do with an inquiry based on the dialectical interplay
between deduction and induction.

> You implied that We had a big problem here on Pynchon-L and you
thought
> that your approach would solve it.

No. I argued that the reading was asking the wrong questions. I was
contributing to, or intervening in, ongoing discussion. It doesn't make
me right and everyone else wrong; it offers a dialogue. If I gave the
impression that it was me vs you (and by implication I'm right and
you're wrong - precisely the kind of adversarial approach I've been
trying, foolishly, to argue against) then that wasn't intentional. I
think the p-list works when people contribute constructively ... to a
process of inquiry that will never reach its goal. Some have done so,
while others just had to chip in with negative anti-intellectualist
gibes. What I think anyone's motivation is, I prefer not to comment on.

I'm still as puzzled as I ever was as to why a forum ostensibly
dedicated to discussing Pynchon's work should descend so often into
infantile bickering. P isn't the easiest of people to read, you have to
work at it. If I'd gatecrashed the Jeffrey Archer list I could perhaps
understand it.

Agreement or disagreement doesn't matter. I'm not interested in working
towards some grand synthesis, or consensual view. It would have to be
pretty banal to command that level of agreement ... which is why inquiry
solves nothing.

> It did not. But it worked.
> 
> If it is dropped, it's because you drop it. The rest of us can't make
> that argument.
> 

The other day, I said I was encouraged that we hadn't started discussing
the Foreword yet. However, my experience here is that you just have to
know when to drop something. There have been what I call wars of
attrition (Dixon's fist and Tolkien are recent examples, before we went
anywhere near "homeland") that serve no purpose whatsoever.