Tolerance and Allegory

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Thanks, Terrance, looks like we have something to talk about (fer
> a change, just kidding). Surely all of us (I hope I'm not being too
> presumptuous, but know I am) have had reservations about some of the
> things our Mr. P does from time to time. Perhaps, if only, we might now
> have some kind of a taking off point to thrash things out.


OK, where to begin, my reading of Pynchon is quite different
from yours, which seems to agree with Wood on some key
points?  

You ask:

"Why don't I care more about what happens, as I
frequently do with other fiction writers? Why does Pynchon
seem less like
fiction than thinly veiled social commentary, philosophy,
science, and
of course linguistists? Plus, why do the proceedings feel
ofttimes like a
big long extended joke (a very funny and brillant one of
course if that's
what one is looking for)?


 
We could begin with Pynchon's allegory, since this is the
focus of the Wood chapter. As I mentioned I think Wood a
misreading of Pynchon, I think McHale's (I often get myself
all mixed up with these books and the other places I have
read portions of them) first, McHale "corrects" with the
second, but the first, "Postmodern Fiction" and the chapter
on allegory is a good a place to start, since this is what
Wood takes
up and I think you have read both.  Wood concentrates on
M&D, McHale on GR. So I suggest we take an "allegory" from
each and discuss them. Of course I
don't agree with McHale's second reading of Pynchon either,
at least from what I can discover in McHale's "narrative." I
disagree with him on the
"YOU" of GR, a critical point. McHale still seems tentative
or confused in book two, and his discussion of 2nd person
narrative, although he  starts off fine, chipping away at
other misreadings, he fails to take any position I can
identify, as he simply quotes from GR in his "narrative's"
"concluding" paragraph ( a tactic I never trust, as I
distrust critic's that use metaphors to their advantage at
the expense of their readers).  He jumps on the meta in
Pynchon's language and positions the reader as Blicero  in a
sexual motif (katje black and white). In McHales second
book,  (a portion of which was posted here recently, in
unreadable form, I think)  he notes that one of the
principle facts of modernist literature is the role of the
dear reader. This is where I think we will need to go with
this discussion. We may need to bring Irony and her sister
Satire out of the nut-house, so that we can address
Pynchon's politics, (Wood calls Pynchon's politics explicit,
(too something for Wood, but not explicit) but Pynchon's
politics are not easily stated, are NOT explicit, but deep
in the subtext, cryptic, often very personal, but very
consistent. If Pynchon fails to tickle us out of our
favorite follies, and wake rip van winkle from a Zoydian
dream it is not for lack of effort and courage. He may to
some extent be said to load up explicit American
concerns---contemporary American "Manifest Destiny" and its
betrayal of  Jeffersonian Democracy. The apparent
agandizement of the executive branch of US government and
the concomitant threat to Americans' civil rights. His
politics must take up his irony, not a rhetorical device in
Pynchon, but as it functions, particularly in GR, as a way
of looking at the world--its often cited
epistemological/ontological function. Underestimating
Pynchon's genius by restricting it to the manic quality of
his prose and some indeterminate comic exhaustion of
modernism or to Melville's broken estate
subjective/objective hunt for an imploding allegory is to
misread his novels and his prose, thus Wood misreads the
Sloth essay as well. Pynchon does indeed inherit Melville's
estate, but its brokeness is not its secularization, but 
its Eliotization.  Pynchon's Luddite essay has been
similarly misread, as a luddite statement, Cowart's reading
of M&D--Luddite Vision--characterizes Pynchon as an
apologist for balance, yes balance.  In any event, the
luddite essay does address one of Pynchon's principle
concerns, automation, but is really a commentary on
literature and genres and his own novels and their roots.
Failure to recognize that Pynchon's  are menippean mostly,
and need to be viewed in light of the ironic treatment of
the  encyclopedia of texts he mingles into his stories with
frightening skill, is akin to failing to understand Eliot's
ironic voices and his foundations in western philosophy.  In
SL intro. Pynchon describes his crowded imagination
reflecting on and in  "TSI" as junkshop, what I call the
junkshop surrealism of TRP. In that little story, written
after V., we find Pynchon compressed. Another good place to
start? 

Terrance--Architectonic w/o material ism