TPPM Watts: Or even back-to-back

[Paul Nightingale]

As in misreadings.

I agree wholeheartedly that middle-class blacks are criticised in the
essay, and this is something I shall address later. However, at no time
do I suggest/indicate/imply that Pynchon makes "a simplistic analogy
between race and class". What I did write was that P-texts are trying to
relate race and class; spelling it out, this means they consider the way
race and class are related or intersect. Nowadays this is pretty
elementary sociology; in the mid-60s it wasn't.

Neither do I try to read the author's mind and reveal his "real
purpose". For the most part I refer to the text, rather than the author;
and I have made it clear that I think the text can be analysed in terms
of its discursive borrowings. What Pynchon actually thought he was doing
is neither here nor there (however interesting his thoughts as a reader
of the text in question).