MDMD Janmes Wood and P's Allegory

[Terrance]

James Wood says, 


"The Limits of Not Quite"
"I believe that distinctions between literary belief and
religion belief are important...I am attracted to writers
who struggle with those distinctions....[mid 19th cent.]
those distinctions became much harder to maintain, and we
have lived in the shadow of their blurring ever since. This
was when the old estate broke."

If this is true, the estate was not broken by Pynchon and his
contemporaries, but 
by much larger cultural events. Moreover, Pynchon laments this broken
and spilled estate. 
There is nostalgia in Pynchon's fiction, a hope, a longing for what
might have been possible. And 
it is, as VL makes quite clear, the narrative quest for the broken and
shattered past, broken with commercialism, with consumerism, with
politics, with betrayal, with neglect (one thinks of how Hector's quest
for Frenesi, RayGun's characterization of the hippie movement, are
contrasted with Prairie's quest for her mother and Zoyd's love for his
daughter), with TV fictions and grand narratives.  


Wood: 
"There is something about narrative that puts the world in
doubt...it makes belief more difficult. A story is a formal
filibuster; it slows down belief until belief falls asleep
and begins to dream its opposite, its negative....Truth
slipped away. And the novel...having founded the religion of
itself, relaxed too gently into aestheticism."


This may be the case, but in Pynchon there is a paradox that Wood seems
to miss. 
Pynchon's novels never relax gently, into aestheticism or postmodernism.
There is a paradox in the nostalgia that pervades the self-conscious
fiction cluttered with broken fragments shored upon a solipsistic
Republic. 

Wood says, 

Great writers--Melville, Flaubert, Woolf, Joyce, move
between the religious impulse and the novelistic,
distinguish and draw on both.

AND

"Thomas Pynchon and the Problem of Allegory"

"Allegory should not be tolerated, unless it overcomes itself
and acts like fiction as it does in Kafka, Mann, Dickens or
elaborates some complex truth--Dante, Kafka, or when "it
explodes itself in the hunt for allegorical truth
(Melville)."



"Pynchon is the inheritor of Melville's broken estate. His
novels behave like allegories that refuse to allegorize,
allegory and the confusion of allegory, are what drive
Pynchon's books and his explicit politics." 


Wood doesn't like the talking inanimates, Pynchon's humor, prose,
irony, characters, digressions, evasive incoherence. He
says, Pynchon  uses allegory to hide the truth, and in so
doing, turns allegory into a fetish of itself. He divides
Pynchon's readers--made by the author--as those that think
him a great occultist, and those that think him a visited
hoaxer. Pynchon's novels only call attention to their own
signification, "which hang without reference, pointing like
a severed arm to nowhere in particular."


Is Wood misreading Pynchon? as a Postmodern? Is Pynchon a postmodern
allegorist or  postmodern satirist? Long before the term Postmodern was
applied to literature we  discover stories which have all the elements
we have come to associate with postmodernist literature and Pynchon. 


We have stories, which,  while apparently comprehensible, have plots
(mythos), that extend beyond literal interpretations to mythological
import.  


Long before postmodrnist literature we  find characters that have
plausibility, but the simplicities and complexities of their qualities
do not connect plausibly to humans. 

Long before Pynchon, we have talking clocks, and talking dogs. 
In Modern literature we find that thoughts influence action and 
character, without issuing from the reasoning processes or
the subconscious impulses of character and without
appearing in their statements; and in which the language
that characters use in conversations has no plausible
literal content or cultural origin. 


I wonder why Mr. Wood doesn't like Pynchon since he loves Melville,
Dostoevski, and Woolf and Joyce and Kafka, etc. 

Melville, often uses ideas (for example Platonism in "Cistern & Buckets
M-D) as context and environment for the development of action in his
novels. Entropy in CL49 or the story so named. 


Dostoevski constructs in his narrative
several dimensions in which different characters view
their own actions and those of others, as well as act. 
One thinks of Katje viewing the film she discovers in which 
the Plot is a character or how Pynchon combines the above, the use of
ideas as context 
and environment when the actors in a film, black face, through Freudian
return of the suppressed, materialize as the black commandos in GR. 

 Kafka permits characters, situations, and thoughts to emerge alike
from a dream context and sets action in frames that shift
and alter literal meanings. One thinks of Mondaugen's dreams, the
solider story and 
the horrific story of Sarah. 

Perhaps, Wood, is Brian McHale's conditioned reader, expecting 19th
century literature from 
21st century innovators. But we, de-conditioned by the multitude bells
tolling, by Pynchon and his contemporaries, salivate,  as the  entropic
white noise blasts through the nostalgic allegories compounded