Tossing horses at the wall to see what pricks

[pynchonoid]

--- Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net> wrote:
> The speculations of MalignD and Doug M. remind us
> that it is not the
> reader's part to recapture the author's original
> emotions and state of
> mind. 

This is not and has never been my project in reading
Pynchon, not here on Pynchon-L and not anywhere.

>It's not possible. Moreover, doing so equates
> the author's final
> text with its germinal impulse, and disregards the
> groping, developing,
> trial-and-error revision characteristic of much
> creative activity, in
> the course of which the initial motivation may be
> changed or
> transformed. 

Nothing to disagree with here.  I tend to agree with
Keith who, if I understand him correctly, sees a major
role for the unconscious in helping to shape the final
product. Please correct me if I misstate your
position, Keith. 

>Pynchon has
> written a Foreword to a Novel. But beyond these
> simple conventions, the
> very emotions and thoughts ultimately expressed
> through the text may
> have undergone a development or even a
> transformation. The text presents
> a whole network of ideas or even systems of ideas
> and values that apply
> to the world evoked by the reader. Current readers
> and writers simply
> can not know what future readers and writers will
> make of a text. So
> the  argument that Pynchon has or has not written a
> Foreword for future
> High School students who may or may not share basic
> assumptions about
> our world doesn't really make a lot of sense.

Certainly, marketing executives and editors at Plume
have a clear picture of who they expect will buy the
centennial edition of _1984_, and these expectations
motivate many of their decisions with regard to the
book:  cover design, cover price, who to hire to write
the Foreword, etc. It's a substantial business
enterprese.  I don't know for sure, but I also expect
that the editor responsible for giving Pynchon the
assignment communicated some or all of this
information to him. 


> What has
> been attempted here,
> after the horse has been beaten into a tire and a
> few dozen jars of
> Elmer's glue, is a sticking of language to a
> denotative wall and a
> stripping of the creative processes of reading and
> writing. 

Disingenous bs. What's happened here is that a handful
of P-listers who don't want to acknowledge that
Pynchon refers to 9-11 and the post-9-11 "fascistic
disposition" of the Bush Administration have spent
many days gratuitously insulting the P-listers who
read the Foreword in this way. 



=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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