IVIV20: Gateway to the past, 351-352

[Mark Kohut]

Well, whatever meanings, as we know from Pynchon's work, resonate beyond 
the symptomatic, it does seem to me that California as "the ark'--as Cailifornia goes, so goes the nation (in his work), so to speak---is one
layer of meaning. The Golden Fang boat is how America was 'saved', he says with the deepest irony....


--- On Thu, 1/14/10, Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com> wrote:

> From: Paul Nightingale <isread at btinternet.com>
> Subject: Re: IVIV20: Gateway to the past, 351-352
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, January 14, 2010, 2:07 PM
> From Mike:
> 
> <<hearkening back to Susan Sontag's essay "Against
> Interpretation"
> (which it's quite possible you're alluding to here, anyway)
> which might be
> apropos here - "instead of a hermeneutics, we need an
> erotics of art">>
> 
> I wasn't in particular, but you might consider the
> following online extract
> from Sontag's essay:
> 
> The old style of interpretation was insistent, but
> respectful; it erected
> another meaning on top of the literal one. The modern style
> of
> interpretation excavates, and as it excavates, destroys; it
> digs "behind"
> the text, to find a sub-text which is the true one. The
> most celebrated and
> influential modern doctrines, those of Marx and Freud,
> actually amount to
> elaborate systems of hermeneutics, aggressive and impious
> theories of
> interpretation. All observable phenomena are bracketed, in
> Freud's phrase,
> as manifest content. This manifest content must be probed
> and pushed aside
> to find the true meaning -- the latent content -- beneath.
> For Marx, social
> events like revolutions and wars; for Freud, the events of
> individual lives
> (like neurotic symptoms and slips of the tongue) as well as
> texts (like a
> dream or a work of art) -- all are treated as occasions for
> interpretation.
> According to Marx and Freud, these events only seem to be
> intelligible.
> Actually, they have no meaning without interpretation. To
> understand is to
> interpret. And to interpret is to restate the phenomenon,
> in effect to find
> an equivalent for it.
> 
> http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/againstInterpExcerpt.shtml
> 
> And back, a return to, my original post:
> 
> However, before taking the bait, we might consider the
> context and
> acknowledge the failure of interpretation: the "glittering
> mosaic of doubt"
> is "[s]omething like ... inherent vice", and then "like
> original sin", or
> even "[l]ike the San Andreas Fault". A few lines further
> Sauncho's "boat"
> has become Doc's "ark", which is how, over the page on 352,
> Doc describes
> California itself. Meaning is always elsewhere, and this
> explanation of the
> novel's title provides little satisfaction if intended to
> provide closure.
> 
> Against modernist interpretation? Allon White's The Uses of
> Obscurity has
> long been a text I admired: he discusses the way in which
> modernist writers
> like James tried to resist what White calls "symptomatic
> reading".
> 
>