pynchon-l-digest V2 #2154

[Doug Millison]

Paul,
> However, I must challenge your carefree
>dismissal of the unreadable.

If you can't read it, how do you know what it says?  ;-)

Anyway, I said I didn't like the tedious lit-crit, I didn't dismiss all
literary-critical studies.  I had the pleasure of studying with Tzvetan
Todorov when he was a visiting professor in the French Department at UC
Berkeley some years ago, as the whole post-structuralist/decon wave was
crashing into the California coast, and he was a delightfully profound
teacher; Leo Bersani was the chairman of the Department at that time, and
if you haven't read his paper on paranoia in Pynchon, I highly recommend
it. I thoroughly enjoy reading Pynchon Notes, and am a regular contributor
(of bibliographical references) to same.  Several lurkers on Pynchon-L,
some of them post occasionally, write wonderful literary-critical articles
that focus on Pynchon.  I guess what I really meant were the P-list poseurs
who throw around a bit of lit-crit jargon and murky sentence structure and
a few stale PoMo cliches here and there -- that I do find tedious.  Dave
Monroe, Michel, Kurt-Werner, Thomas E, Cyrus-- these names come to mind
immediately as frequent P-listers who appear to have a deep grasp of
concepts literary-critical and how to apply them fruitfully to Pynchon's
work.

Sorry you don't appear to find Pynchon useful to understand the present
state of affairs.  That his writing works at that level, as well as at so
many other levels simultaneously, is what makes him such an appealing
writer, for my money.  He has tapped into the basic political-historial
truths of our era, in a voice that to this 20th century American at least,
is compelling and irresistable, in an astonishing prose style quite
literally without peer, working with material that is rightly called
"encyclopedic", with an exceptional command of the Western literary
tradition that has secured him a place within same  -- put me in the camp
of those who consider P the greatest living novelist working in English.

Cordially,
Doug