Pynchon and fascism

[Terrance]

Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> Thanks to everyone making me work here.
> 
> On analysis ... I think the term would be textual analysis, bearing in
> mind the way 'text' includes the relationship between words-on-the-page
> and (a) what is elsewhere called context and (b) the act of reading.
> I've mentioned P's reading of a reading in the "O's intentions" passage.
> His writing in that passage could've been designed (I'm not trying to
> second-guess him) as an illustration of Derrida's point that nothing is
> outside the text. To say the real world (material actuality) is out
> there somewhere is one thing; but the moment you think or write about
> it, that real world is implicated in the text.

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






> 
> That is how I read (interpret?) jbor's paragraph about where the text
> starts. In a sense it never starts and never ends, and when I said the
> model I offered was a starting-point I didn't mean there was nothing
> that pre-existed it in terms of reading. Call it an intervention as
> opposed to starting-point.
> 
> However, Foucault does distinguish between origins and historical
> beginnings: "What is found at the historical beginning of things is not
> the inviolable identity of their origin; it is the dissension of other
> things. It is disparity." I suppose that "dissension" or "disparity"
> among things is where I find my reading obsession with oppositions.
> 
> The 'thing' in question might be a concept like fascism, or the kind of
> behaviour we label fascist, or the way the term is used, or the way
> behaviour/usage changes etc. I think P writes in such a way as to
> highlight, not so much the way such meanings come about, but rather that
> 'we' are always implicated in such processes ... what I mean when I say
> he's asking how we know what we know.