S/Z

[Dave Monroe]

I was thinking, think, the ending of The Crying of Lot 49 in
particular, most any given Pynchon ovel in general, but ...

On Tue, Jan 11, 2011 at 12:17 PM, Ian Livingston
<igrlivingston at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hm. Seems to me 'truth' is a tough nut to crack no matter how it is
> revealed. Socrates' take was that truth and beauty coincide, but to
> attempt to restrict either to verbal constructs is, at best, a
> practice, or training, to prepare the psyche to recognize truth and
> beauty upon encountering them. There are some who suggest that any
> representation of experience is, at best, an educated guess and that
> truth is therefore transient. My suspicion, as a sort of educated
> guess, is that those who go seeking truth--whether in practice or
> literature--tilt after windmills. In the hermeneutic of any dialog the
> object in question seems more nearly a matter of resonance rather than
> of truth, per se. We look for relative degrees of agreement.
>
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 7:38 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
>> From Roland Barthes, S/Z: An Essay (trans. Richard Miller, New York:
>> Hill & Wang 1974 [1970]), Sec. XXXII,  "Delay":
>>
>> "Truth is brushed past, avoided, lost. This accident is a structural
>> one. In fact, the hermeneutic code has a function, the one we (with
>> Jakobson) attribute to the poetic code: just as rhyme (notably)
>> structures the poem according to the expectation and desire for
>> recurrence, so the hermeneutic terms structure the enigma according to
>> the expectation and desire for its solution.  The dynamics of the text
>> (since it implies a truth to be deciphered) is thus paradoxical: it is
>> a static dynamics: the problem is to maintain the enigma in the
>> initial void of its answer; whereas the sentences quicken the story's
>> 'unfolding' amid cannot but help move the story along, the hermeneutic
>> code performs an opposite action: it must set up delays (obstacles,
>> stoppages, deviations) in the flow of the discourse; its structure is
>> essentially reactive, since it opposes the ineluctable advance of
>> language with an organized set of stoppages ... [...]  Expectation
>> thus becomes becomes the basic condition for truth: truth, these
>> narratives tell us, is what is at the end of expectation." (pp. 75-6)
>>
>> http://us.macmillan.com/Book.aspx?isbn=9780374521677
>>
>> http://books.google.com/books?id=XpqlCCG73YIC
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S/Z
>>
>> http://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=10346
>>
>
>
>
> --
> Klaatu barada nikto
>