IVIV (12): 195-197

[Joseph Tracy]

  No one has claimed an exclusively political reading. No one. This  
is easily demonstrated.  Virtually everyone seems interested in a  
plurality of readings, though some seem more inclined to satire as  
the central defining quality of the work. You seem to wish to exclude  
a political reading as "blunt hammer blows" or as beneath the  
interest of this great literary artist, or rank it low in importance.  
This is false to Pynchon and false to his ambition of building a  
layered inclusive vision of the world, and nothing is beneath his  
interest.. Plenty of writers exclude or ignore the political  
dimensions of the world , but Pynchon engages it directly an many  
levels, from the poetically personal to the satirically derisive.

Your use of the word Romance is inept. It defies traditional use in  
lit cri. It is a bloated interpretation of the word and  
idiosyncratically tied to alice wellintown's diction.
On Nov 5, 2009, at 2:16 PM, alice wellintown wrote:

>> After all as Keith says it's fiction and fiction needs conflict if  
>> not
>> between  characters then between ideas.
>
> And there is plenty of both to go around in those P-texts. The
> political reading is, as politics always is, an approach that can not
> abide the plurality of readings or any other disciplne that would
> claim a higher ground. But in a Romance, it is the imaginative reading
> that is closest to "the truth of the human heart". The scientific
> reading of texts and the world is satirized in P-texts. This is a
> standard in Romance. That the political readers would dismiss an
> imaginative reading of a Romance, of a fiction, by attacking the woman
> and not the argument, exposes them. The ideas are poetic, are
> fictionalized. The stuff of imagination and dream. To reduce a text to
> its political hammer blows is a obtuse. A blunt instrument can not a
> poem open.