How is Pynchon like Shakespeare (not sayin he is; just sayin' this)

[Michael F]

Alice,

You're not too far off. Content wise, Shakespeare and Pynchon do have
alot in common: they both smash our Modernized grand ideas of the
individual, and Modern man's desire for freedom of our own devising.
However, the readers in an age of radical empiricism are too addicted
to form to notice this.

Mike

On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 4:06 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> The best readings of these puzzling poems [Shakespeare's Sonnets] remain those
>> that keep themselves open to ambiguity and multiplicity. I especially cherish an
>> essay by the critic William Empson (who did his first degree in mathematics) in
>> which it is calculated that simply at the semantic level, Sonnet 94 – the dark
>> and wounded “They that have power to hurt” – contains “4096 possible movements
>> of thought, with other possibilities.
>
> Why favor ambiguity and multiplicity? This approach, while seemingly
> democratic,  smacks of reader response and relativism. Why do we need
> Shakespeare's texts, if the best readings are those made by readers
> themselves who are encouraged to exploit any any all ambiguity, as if
> flotsam, jetsam, lagan and derelict are inherent vices of a voyage on
> board Chapman's Homer in the Pacific?
>
> Calculate? Can Empson number the grains of sand and hairs as well? Ah
> blasphamey! Shakespeare is no holy book for Newton to apply his
> calculus to.
>