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

[Michael F]

Humberto,

Our Modern concepts of "desire" are the smashing agent in both
Shakespeare's comedies and tragedies...

Mike
On Fri, Jan 7, 2011 at 10:15 AM, Humberto Torofuerte
<strongbool at gmail.com> wrote:
> I submit that the difference is that there is no example of a
> mysterious "They" in Shakespeare?  The freedom smashing agent (be it
> family rivalries or a conspiring Ensign) is visible at all times...at
> least to the audience...and lets you see who's holding the hammer when
> it falls.  But I'm looking forward to being proven wrong...
>
> On Thu, Jan 6, 2011 at 6:37 PM, Michael F <mff8785 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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.
>>>
>>
>