McHoul and Wills criticism

[doktor at primenet.com]

Djuna35 at aol.com writes:

>> I'm doing some background reading, prepping to teach 'Lot49' again, and I
>> decided to delve into the  Alec McHoul and David Wills book, 'Writing
>> Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis' (1990).  I'm up on the usual
>> suspects-- Tanner, Kermode, etc.-- from having worked with the novel a decade
>> ago, so I wanted to tackle something more recent.
>> But I'm not sure what I think of this deconstruction of 'Lot49': does anyone
>> out there have an opinion about their take on TRP?

Surely it cannot be your goal to make your students hate Pyncyhon.  I have
often wondered how such a turgid book about such an exciting writer ever
made it to publication.  Maybe someone at the University of Illinois Press
didn't have the courage to say that the emperor has no clothes.  I mean,
here's a representative sample:

"And on the other hand our implicit and explicit reference to the work of
Derrida throughout this discussion means that problems of
representation and signification are reformulated as problems of writing,
where 'writing' refers to those functions by which both classical models of
signification (the one-to-one relation of words to things) and their
counterparts in structuralism (the transcendental relation of the
operations of the signifier) are exceeded by effects of the system itself."

To which the appropriate response is a) yuck; b) hooey; or c) will that be
on the test?

Andrew Dinn writes:

>I have not read this book but I have heard reports to the effect that
>it is often far-fetched. I do recommend that you take a(nother?) look
>at `New Essays on Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49'. It contains some
>superb essays.

Amen to that!  There is also A Companion to The Crying of Lot 40 by J.
Kerry Grant, Robert D. Newman's chapter on CoL49 in Understanding Thomas
Pynchon and, of course, Tony Tanner.  Pynchon is about much more than
words, the relationship of writer to reader and information theory.  Yes,
those are parts of his work, but to concentrate on them is to miss much
more.  Had we but world enough and time deconstructionist criticism were no
crime, but I assume that you have but a part of a semester to turn your
charges on to TRP.  Steer clear of arid wordplay.

Peevishly,

--Jimmy

http://www.angelfire.com/oh/Insouciance/index.html