"He thinks he's hallucinating" m

[alice wellintown]

>> extreme reader response, and I would say that ignoring the marks on
>> the page, arranged by the author in a conventional way, is extreme
>> reader response, has merit if if one's objective is to discover
>> psychological patterns or complexes in individual readers.
>
> right, and one could look that way and see a lot worth seeing
> but that's looking away from the text

That's looking into the reader. The text in such readings is held up
to a reader and to reading, like the mirror hamlet would have his
actors hold up to nature.

> but, well, lit as communication person to person asynchronous
> depends on acceptance of convention
> and I'm not looking to ignore convention or what's written so much as
> to comment on the idea that it's not inconceivable that within the
> plenum of meaning in Shasta's simple words, there might be an intended
> notion of some kind of listener

It is not inconceivable. Indeed, though the first conception was a
aborted, the changeling is still.



>
> to quantify, maybe 95/5, simple convention like my spouse has talked
> about me in my presence with nobody else there to good-natured comedic
> effect, or sometimes to convey (to me) and vent (for her own
> satisfaction) her frustration with where I'm at
>
> I'm down with that meaning: that is a meaning I'm familiar with!  And
> to see it in a Pynchon book is to be reminded of romantic and
> quotidian concatenations; I don't see it in this sense as a virtuosic
> turn at all on his part - only one of a great many familiar
> associations to be had at every turn in the text, a part of a building
> of a fictional world (or like Letterman's "Pyramid of Comedy" that he
> used to do sometimes on the show back when I used to watch it
> faithfully in the early 80s)
>
> just another brick in the wall: like Nick Danger and Nancy remembering Pig Night
>
> but like in Jazz, the variations can sometimes lead off the beaten
> path; overtones can summon a completely different meaning to a phrase

Sure. On this, Jazz got nothing on Shakespeare.

> sure, she's trying to keep it light, that's the one chord, but then
> the way she does it - appealing to a reasonable third party is like
> your minor seventh

Hate to be an absolute knave and a grave digger,  but what third party?

> a nonexistent third party (and that in itself is a bluesy kind of a
> minor 7th, why come she can't be in Doc's world, isn't his trip groovy
> enuf for her)

That bluesy minor is not in that phrase. Is it? Isn't it in the
contradistinction of her clothes and his apartment and what was and
what will never be. And, we hear these minors because Pynchon plays
them for us with other phrases and sentences. It's a lot of weight you
want to load onto a missing pronoun. If it were the only example, I
would be more inclined to read it as you conceive it, but given at
least dozens of other dropped pronouns in the text, I'm inclined to
read it as I read the others.