GR translation: demolition man

[David Morris]

Alice!  A great post with which I wholly agree!

On Saturday, November 10, 2012, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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.
>
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