McHoul & Wills' chapter Re: SLSL Intro "Almost But Not Quite Me ..."

[Dave Monroe]

And speaking of babies 'n' bathwater ...

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> 
> I read, or tried to read, other of McHoul and Wills'
> stuff on Pynchon way back when and the rest of it is
> equally poor, both near-unintelligible and devoid of
> any actual substance at the same time. It strikes me
> that this sort of pretentious gobbledygook,
> bowdlerising ideas from Foucault, Barthes, Derrida,
> Freud et al. and then misapplying these in a
> seemingly arbitrary way to anything and everything
> that comes to mind is exactly the sort of stuff
> which both made possible and became the target of
> the infamous Alan Sokal hoax.

Well, this is the standard write-off here, pretty much
everywhere these days, isn't it?  I don't get it,
therefore it's not worth reading.  "Tried to read, "
but ....  On the other hand, I keep throwing myself
at, say, Pynchon, Derrida, whoever, precisely BECAUSE
I don't necessarily "get" it, certainly not all of it,
and I, we, probably never will, so ...

"Devoid of substance" = absence = bad?  Why you mean
old logocentrist, you ...

No, it's not a shining example of the genre (er,
Anglo-[Australo-]American deconstructive lit crit, or
whatever), and, having retyped--"transferred," indeed
(one's own "transference," "misapplication," "puerile
pastiche"?)--much of the damn thing, believe you me,
those boys could have done with some judicious editing
(rather than my--judicious as possible, I
believe--manual cut'n'paste job), but ... 

Well, again, they do latch onto some interesting
idiosyncracies in that "Introduction."  The
preoccupation with "intertextuality" of whatever
stripe, that acute "anxiety of influence" or whatever.
 The rhetorical moves by which he maybe doesn't QUITE
take responsibility for the very ("very") shortcomings
he singles out in his own work.  
The fact that he doesn't even mention "Mortality and
Mercy in Vienna" or Gravity's Rainbow (though I recall
a hint at the latter).  The notion that a notion of
authorship does indeed entail a notion of readership,
of interpretation, and that the "Introduction" might
well be entailing one of its own.  And so forth ...  

Babies, bathwater ...

And skipping ahead here ...

> Laughably, they don't even seem aware that what they
> are writing, and the particular theories they are
> appealing to, apply reflexively to their very own
> current text as well.

Do be aware of, do beware your own pretentions
("laughably"??), bowdlerizations, gobbledygookery,
theoretical or otherwise ...

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