VLVL2 The Return of Weed Atman

[Ghetta Life]

>From: Terrance <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
>To: Ghetta Life <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com>
>CC: tobylevy at juno.com, pynchon-l at waste.org
>Subject: Re: VLVL2 The Return of Weed Atman
>Date: Mon, 29 Dec 2003 12:14:04 -0500
>
>
>
>Ghetta Life wrote:
> >
> > What evidence do you have that Weed is any different than the other 
>Thanatoids?  Is it that you know Weed's history, but not the others'? 
>There's no textual support for making Weed any more or less dead than the 
>others.
>
>There may be evidence that Weed is different from other Thanatoids, but I 
>guess we will have to wait and see what we learn about him later on. For 
>now, I think we should try to define KA and Thanatoid and Shade Creek as 
>best we can. It may true that Pynhcon's texts provide no unambiguous 
>definitions of KA, Thanatoid, Shade Creek, but if we just give it the old 
>college try ... well we might ... we might ...
>
>A good place to start is back in Father Fairing's Parish.
>
>"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."

A James Wood quote:   "Readers of Pynchon often mistake bright lights for 
evidence of habitation."

And:  "Some of the more impressive novelistic  minds of our age do not think 
that language  and the representation of consciousness  are the novelist's 
quarries any  more. Information has become the new  character ..."

I don't agree that Pynchon's signs are as pointless as he argues, but they 
are often multi-valent and often require background sources.

Ghetta

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