Pynchon and fascism

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> >>>Anyway, thanks for your lengthy response, and I hope I'm making sense
> here.<<<
> 
> This discussion is helpful for me in that it approaches the text as a piece
> of literature instead of as a political editorial. As literature it is using
> devices, and the reader can use devices, which lead to a more complex and
> diversified understanding characteristic of art as opposed to a more prosaic
> political editorial.

When we read and discuss something written by Pynchon, author of
Gravity's Rainbow and some other stories and essays, we are involved
somehow in a  proliferation of meaning. People will say things like,
"Both/And" or the word "nothing" signifies or means something to
Existentialism and something else to Christian theology and so on. But
how do we prevent infinite proliferation and yet maintain a pluralistic
and open discussion of a text? One way to do this is to talk about the
"author" and his/her "work." What is an author? What is a work?
Interesting questions. I'm not going to try to answer them. One function
of the author (i.e. Pynchon, Orwell, Homer) is to limit the
proliferation of significations and thus possible meanings.  But, for
the author to function in this way we can't think about him, as we have
traditionally and often do here on Pynchon-L, as the genial creator of a
work in which he deposits, with infinite wealth and generosity, and
inexhaustible world of significations. We are so accustomed to thinking
of the author as so very different from us ordinary men and women, and
so transcendent with regard to all languages that, as sooon as he
speaks, meaning begins to proliferate, to proliferate indefinitely. But
we know, being post-religious thinkers, that the author is not God (both
god and the author are dead); not the indefinite source of
significations which fill a work; the author does not precede the works;
he is a certain functional principle by which, in our culture, one
limits, excludes, and chooses; in short, by which one impedes the free
circulation, the free manipulation, the free composition, decomposition,
and recomposition of fiction. Fact is,  if we are accustomed to
presenting the author as a genius, as a perpetual surging of invention,
it is because,  in reality, we make him function in exactly the opposite
fashion. 

Something ideological in all this? Sure, because when a historically
given function, like the author function Foucault describes and I have
outlined above, is represented in a figure that inverts it, we have an
ideological production. 

What is an author? 

In this function, the author is the ideological figure by which one
marks the manner in which we fear the proliferation of meaning.