Pynchon and fascism

[Vincent A. Maeder]

Well, Terrance, it goes back to a prior post you had on Goofy Mustaches.
. .

		[>>Well, if he's Dostoyevsky ... but isn't crankiness
sort of a good thing for an author to be if he/she wants to write
satire? Maybe not. I like cranky fiction. I think it's a blast. Cranky
prose is another matter. The Pynchon Foreword is not fiction, it's
prose. Circumlocution and comfy pillows.<<] 

. . . and a division (apparent only to me working amongst the deep
lurkers here) that prose is somehow distinct from fiction for purposes
of the artistic expression.  Not being literate in literary analysis, I
can only approach this subject from the writer's point of view.  All
writing contains a POV, and the goal of that writing is to create a
coherent POV (while some will claim Pynchon is unable to maintain a
specific POV, I would disagree arguing that his squirming into dream,
hallucination, and so on creates the POV).  POV is also present in
nonfiction or essayist literature as well.  For example, there is a
difference in the POV of a work by Sartre versus Plato, yet they are
both "prose".  In other words, simply because a piece is not fiction
does not mean it cannot contain traditional fictional components of
circumlocution, hyperbole, satire, deception and that ultimate POV, the
unreliable narrator/POV, amongst others.

So your question, "What kind of fiction is the Foreward?" is perhaps
better structured as, "What POV is created by the Foreward?"  The choice
of wording depends upon the POV under which the analyst him/herself is
working.  Your mileage will vary based on the type of assumptions your
analysis engine operates under.

V.

-----Original Message-----
From: Terrance
every text is the work of an author. the author can, however, be
considered as separate from the text. since you have been talking about
the internal determinates of the text, you are also talking about the
author as presented by the text itself.  the text may present itself as
the work of an author quite different from actual author of the text.
but in any case, this authorial voice will be present throughout the
text as determining its approach or context or point of view or
perspective. the way in which the text presents its own authorship is
what I call the Perspective of the text. 

every text has not only a Perspective, but a Perspective on something.
that on which any particular text has a Perspective  is its subject
matter, and that on which texts in general have a Perspective is
Reality. 

Again, What kind of fiction is the Foreword? 

no reply. 

Again, the text's interpretation of the subject is its Reality. 

even fictional texts present a fictional reality, and this fictional
reality admits of the same variations as non-fictional reality. the
distinction presented between the reality presented by fiction and by
non-fiction is therefore not essential here, but is a subsequent
distinction made within one or another conception of the real. 

Reality, like the author, can be considered as external to the text, but
since you are working (working hard while I'm hardly working) in a
semantic  [French sémantique, from Greek semantikos, significant, from
semantos, marked, from semainein, seman-, to signify, from sema, sign]
context I think what you are looking for is Reality as presented in the
text. in the semantic context all realities are realities presented in
texts. As I said previously, if a more technical term is required, we
can call the reality signified by the text the Signification of the
text. 

the reality presented in the text is its interpretation of the subject
matter. 

The subject could be something real big, like KNOWING, for example. 

How do we know? 

Again, it all go back to the Greeks? 

Knowing, Being, Meaning. 

Turn, Turn, Turn, being knowing and time and there is a time for every
question lifted and dropped on my saw horses bending my sore knees and
swing your hammer, Paul, in the morning. 

Now if I had a hammer