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

[barbara100 at jps.net]

So handsome when you're mad......

Happy Thanksgiving!



----- Original Message -----
From: "Dave Monroe" <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com>
To: "jbor" <jbor at bigpond.com>; <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 6:54 PM
Subject: Re: McHoul & Wills' chapter Re: SLSL Intro "Almost But Not Quite Me
..."


> 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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