Pynchon and fascism

[jbor]

on 29/5/03 4:43 PM, Paul Nightingale at isread at btopenworld.com wrote:

> but they are
> questions of interpretation; what I'm trying to do is discuss ways of
> analysing the text, to my mind an important distinction.

I'm interested in this distinction. In my experience, one analyses a text in
order to interpret it. The two activities can't be separated like this.
Together, they constitute the reading process. Is the proposition here that
"analysis" is more "objective" than "interpretation", so that whatever
conclusions a reader who claims he or she is only "analysing the text" (like
the conclusion that "homeland" and "enemy bombs" refer specifically to the
Patriot Act and 9/11 in Pynchon's Foreword) are true? To my way of thinking
those conclusions are an interpretation of the text, just like the
interpretation offered that these, along with the other descriptive phrases
and terms in the paragraph, refer specifically to England and Churchill's
war government during WW II. Of necessity both interpretations involve
making decisions about what the text does *not* refer to - clearly, it
doesn't refer to *everything* - and there's no difference in this respect
between the conclusions which have been offered.

I analysed the text in order to reach an interpretation of it. I also took
notice of different analyses and interpretations which were offered (Otto's,
specifically) in my analysis. Apart from the "you're wrong and I'm right",
"every other reader and reviewer in the world has concluded that it's about
9/11 and Bush", people on the p-list are "sharks" or "fascist
Bush-supporters" or "contrarians" and so are always "distorting" Pynchon's
text and whatever "we" write about what he's "really" saying, and "just
arguing for the sake of arguing" or "picking on Doug" childishness and lies
and evasions, is there any actual basis for claiming that your conclusions
about what "Pynchon is saying" in the paragraph are accurate and another
reader's aren't? There's a lot in the theoretical bases you defer to that I
agree with, but one of the consequences of the sorts of those critical
theories (Foucault, poststructuralism, Baudrillard, Hayden White etc) is
that text does not have a fixed and stable meaning. That's why my final
position, in respect to the extensive and, to my mind, productive debates
conducted with Otto and Terrance on the paragraph, is that our
interpretations of it differ, and that neither one nor the other is
definitively "right" or definitively "wrong", and that what we essentially
end up disputing is Pynchon's intention, which is a mug's game. (I don't buy
the "it's there in the text, some see it and some don't" line either, by the
way, which is just another way of saying that some readers are deficient, or
less incisive, than others, and that Pynchon really did deliberately encode
the meanings which "we" see into his text. It's nowhere near that clear-cut
in this particular instance.)

I'd add that the distinction between "analysis" and "interpretation" which
you're offering doesn't sit at all well with the all-text-is-narrativised
proposition.

best