Pynchon and fascism

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> 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. 



Sorry, should have been REsolves (to separate (something) into
constituent parts) problems. 




Indeed, P's writing is
> about endless inquiry, any number of interweaved, endless inquiries that
> never reach their goal. 

In my opinion, P's writing is not Analysis (a disentanglement) or
Inquiry (Resolving of problems) but a "progressive knotting into" 
oppositions, conflicts, and paradoxically sustained agons. Oedipa is
still waiting for ... she's not Oedipus Rex, the riddle solver who
solves the riddle. 


> 
> > 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. 

You did argue that the reading was asking the wrong questions.  You
implied that it was a problem to ask the wrong question. You presented
your approach to resolve (again, to separate into constituent parts the
problem and you were fairly successful. 


I was
> contributing to, or intervening in, ongoing discussion. It doesn't make
> me right and everyone else wrong; it offers a dialogue. 

Of course it doesn't make your right and everyone else wrong, but it did
so something more important than merely argue that the **wrong**
questions were being asked, it asked new questions about why we were
asking the questions and how we came to be asking them based on what P
wrote and read and what we read and wrote and so on... 



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 never got that impression. As I said to MJ, I understand what Paul has
written. 
As I said, your method was analytical and not conflict or friction or
agon. 


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.

You can avoid this if you want. You can't stop it. Trying to only makes
it grow. 



> 
> 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.

If you came here to solve problems you wasted your time. But you didn't. 


> 
> > 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.


Not everything has a purpose.