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

[William Zantzinger]

--- Dave Monroe <davidmmonroe at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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 ...


I've read tons of stuff on Pynchon and some of it is
very hard to get. Some is worth getting and some is
not. The former include, Kharpertian, Hohmann, Eddins,
Hume, Hite, Moore (all four have been ripped apart
here on P-L by readers that I suspect have not been
able or willing to get passed the first 50 pages or
so). The ripping is easy enough to see if you've read
the books being ripped. The latter include, McHoul &
Wills (glad that Robert was willing to explain why he
doesn't like their books, don't expect MalignD will),
Plater (Plater book does a good job on Baedeker but
goes off the deep end), Hollander (same as Plater,
does a fairly decent job with scant biographical
information but goes off the deep end when he reads
Pynchon himself as a  paranoid-fearing assassination-
disinherited victim of the Rocket-fellers etc., Hanjo
Berressem, Dugdale. 

Of course some of Pynchon criticism is easy to get and
bad and some is easy to get and good, like Tanner. 

M&W is both difficult to read and not worth reading. I
guess readers have to find out for themselves, but
these guys are essentailly Freudians. So, if you are
expecting an objective close reading of the text
you're going to be disappointed. Every once in a while
an essay that is little more than one reader
self-consciously reading a Pynchon chapter is
published. Why? Don't know. But that's pretty much
where M&W fit in. 

What a bunch of Turkeys, We are reading  piss poor
criticism of a poorly written Introduction to badly
written stories? 

YES!











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