Tolerance and Allegory

[Paul Mackin]

Couldn't find the Wood piece on M&D in the New Republic archives (will
go back and look again) but while there read his review of Underworld,
which surely gives a good idea of  what might also apply in Wood's mind to
Pynchon as well, to wit:

DeLillo uses his characters to force home his themes, or to do so by
exaggerating his themes into comedy. DeLillo has often seemed to me a
didactic writer who wants to be honored for not being one. Mao II, his last
novel, was a geometric sermon. In Underworld, everything always comes back
to a few ports: nuclear war, the secret power of the American government,
the paranoid state in which the bomb put us all, the ambushing power of the
postmodern image-culture. The book is neurotically webbed--not surprising,
perhaps, for a novel that seems to believe that "everything is connected."
Underworld proves, once and for all, or so I must hope, the incompatibility
of paranoid history with great fiction. (That private paranoias can generate
great fiction is obvious from Dostoevsky and Svevo.) Why is political
paranoia so bad for the novel? In part because it is a mysticism facing a
form that exists to repel it. Paranoia has an unlicensed freedom that
outraces fiction, whose formal task is to establish a licensed freedom. At a
simple level, this can be seen in DeLillo's language. It is often richly
exact; but when DeLillo writes about secrets, about hidden plots and
political viruses, his language becomes a thick scrabble. It sickens unto
vagueness.

But back to me for a comment of my own--whatever the merit of Wood's
criticism it applies even more so to P than to D. Actually I quite enjoyed
Underworld as a conventional well written novel on which the broken
allegory could easily be ignored.

			P.