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

[Mark Kohut]

Shakespeare favors ambiguity and multiplicity, not no relative reader response 
addendumdum...

Counting the turns of thought ain't Newtonian nor even real mathematics. Just 
counting. Like when you dance.

But I bet you're being "ironic", eh alice?

Rereading The Sonnets, with only simple-- but not so simple,-- Arden edition 
annotations 

is an astonishing experience...The root connectedness of so many words and 
images.....

is almost a transcendent experience...




 


----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thu, January 6, 2011 6:06:26 PM
Subject: Re: How is Pynchon like Shakespeare (not sayin he is; just sayin' this)

> 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.