GR translation: demolition man

[alice wellintown]

P's writings certainly convey the notion that much in life remains
mysterious, and much in Nature a mystery, and that paradoxes and what
Newton called absurdities persist, despite the efforts of our greatest
minds to unravel them, to lock them in reason, to unlock the deepest
secrets of scatter-brained Mother Nature, or force Her or fix her in a
model...etc....

Does P make or even entertain the philosophical claim that there are
infinite truths?

If, in P's novels there were but one world, we could say that the
truths about it are as infintie as the characters who can make claims
to it, and these may multiply, even contradict earlier claims, and so
on.

Still we would not necessarily be dealing with infinite truths,  but
with competing, and with, perhaps, valid formulations of the truth.

To return to the Ohio Zone thread, his characters inhabit zones
unmappable. It's not a matter of infinite truths, but that the world
is not one, and so pluralism, or valid interpreations of models of the
truth, of the world that is the case, are inadequate not simply
because, as David Hume might put it, Newton's absurditiies restored
Nature to the obsurity, the inexplicable, the incomprehensible,
because, like Henry Adams, we have been educated about forces that,
like the force of the cross or the virgin, function in and across
zones.

And, anyway, if Wood assumes that language must be reduced to its
communication function, like the way one walks, or dresses to
communicate, and that a clear and unambiguous message is an
expectation that readers have when they open a work of fiction, he's
an idiot. If from a work of art we are to take a clear and unambiguos
message, we deny or restrict the more powerful job of language,
thinking, thinking by the artist and by the audience, reducing iart to
a message mass produced and exchanged for money.

Dollars be damned! As Melville wrote of his Moby-Dick, after penning
several Inherent Vices.

> We have to accept this sort of thing in Pynchon--if we can't, we
> gravitate toward James Wood's view of him as meaning everything and
> therefore nothing.
>
> Is it an unconscious impulse he can't control? Is it indecision as to
> what he wants to say?
>
> Is it the truth that there IS no truth? Or a million truths?  Or that
> one truth contradicts another truth.
>
> Life is overdetermined.  In life we find not one truth but many,
> infinitely many.   Pynchon's writing conveys that great mystery.
>
> Or not.