Pynchon and fascism

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> I think I would have to agree that the distinction is a difficult one.
> However, 'interpretation' refers to 'understanding what the text means'
> or 'explaining what it means'. Hence, one decodes the text. In Freudian
> terms, the latent meaning gives way to the manifest content through the
> efforts of the reader. Meaning is 'disguised' by the text, or somehow
> 'in' the text, and has to be 'brought to the surface'. Hence, there is a
> separation of the text from whatever we decide its meaning is. The text
> has become a vehicle for the message, from which we might infer that the
> same message could choose another vehicle (go by train rather than bus).

And another term: 

explication de texte: A method of literary criticism in which the
interrelated details of a written work are examined and analyzed in an
effort to understand its structure and discover meanings. [French, what
else?]

You're talking about is the difference between  "Reality" and "Method." 
 
But you're mixing and matching them up. You are attributing the
"reality" or interpretation of the text to the reader and the method of
the text to the text. 
But the text has its own reality or interpretation and its own
method--order or structure or form or connectedness or argument. 


Also, since Freud worked during an epistemic period he was concerned
with the nature of knowledge, its presuppositions and foundations, and
its extent and validity [Greek knowledge, from epistasthai, to
understand]

He called what he did Interpretation. BTW,  Marx also worked in an
epistemic period. Freud and Marx were materialistic interpreters of the
human lot or the human condition and of texts. Freud's reading of the
Moses of Michelangelo Buonarroti is a good example. Both Marx and Freud
present an account of man and his consciousness by the substratum that
determines it. For Marx it is the conditions of material production
which are decisive in determining Man's consciousness. For Marx, as for
Freud, the content of consciousness is not itself the primary reality,
but is derivative from the realities that underlie it. Freud's works
reveal to consciousness the unconscious reality that underlie it. 

Leavis, I think, was interested in discovering the universal truth (sort
of like Freud's Eros/Thanatos) that lies behind language or that
underlies texts-- Materialistic.