GRGR: welcome new voices (was ? Re: Tolerance and Allegory missing word

[rj]

Mark:
> Why should we read anyone as a "traditional American writer"? 

Particularly Pynchon. Hopefully the majority of his readers have
outgrown the colonialist inferiority complex which leads to such a
baldly nationalistic assertion. What of Rilke and Dante and German
Expressionist cinema in *GR*? This need to indulge in such narrow
critical box-making eventually leads people to start conflating William
Blake with Menippean satire ... Good grief!

Certainly, references to Melville and Hawthorne are evident in Pynchon's
works, but I think you'll find that they are *more* in evidence
elsewhere in modern fiction. Gaddis's *The Recognitions* deconstructed
the American Puritan literary tradition (which was a tradition of
believing that there was such a tradition) way back in 1955, and is
resonant with allusions to *The Confidence-Man* and *Moby-Dick* (as well
as to Thoreau's *Walden*); while Updike's 'Scarlet Letter trilogy'
exemplifies an opposite (but superficially similar) aspiration, his
novels asserting themselves as a continuation of the
Modernist/American/Protestant tradition ( ... of believing there are
such traditions to uphold and prolong, and that it is worthwhile and
proper to do so .... )

Likewise, if one wants Menippean satire in pomo clothes then why look
further than Barth's Funhouses and Operas? And if one wants the
paradigmatic (and unencrypted) meditation on the assassination of JFK
why not look to DeLillo's *Libra*, as a neighbouring discussion-list has
only recently, and quite successfully, done. If these are what Pynchon's
fictions are then they are not even the best available examples of
either mode or subject.

Why dispense with numinousness, the singularity, of the reading
experience? Particularly with *GR*, as David Morris asks.

On this, Jan:

> Did the New Critics, for instance, really
> claim that there was only one correct way to read, say, "Kubla Khan"?

No, but they totally disenfranchised the particular current or future
reader, imposing a sequence and scope of "correct" readings, or layers
of meaning, which are to be beheld as fixed in the poem. After Wimsatt
or Cleanth Brooks have sucked out all this content then there the
literary edifice sits for all eternity, cold and dry and unapproachable
as a museum exhibit -- closed. New Criticism is a pedagogy rather than
an aesthetics. 

> If I leave my copy of
> GR next to my bed when I go to sleep, it will be there in the morning. 
> It won't
> have altered, it won't have spawned an additional 100 pages, it will be the same
> text.

Are you sure? Open your mind.

>  What does change, however, is the way people read GR.

And, *GR*, an exemplar of post-structuralist aesthetics, changes the way
in which people read.

best