A Historical Novel of a New Sort

[Paul Mackin]

On Mon, 2005-01-24 at 20:08 -0500, Terrance wrote:
> Sounds like what the above is saying is that some of Pynchon's readers
> and/or critics are are exceedingly dense (hope there are examples given)
> failing right off the bat to recognize that Pynchon is not a Herman Wouk
> but a writer who actually CAN thwart readers' automatic explanations of
> things, interrogate their unrecognized beliefs concerning good and evil,
> etc,,etc. In other words can do things that make one a good writer. Is
> there much more to it than this? If so, are the mere existences of poor
> readers and critics a very sturdy even partical base upon which to build
> a scholarly article? People who have read Inger Dalsgaard's article will
> know the answer. I'm just giving my untutored reaction to the brief
> excerpt.
> 
> Same here ... but I would add that the critic seems to argue that the "dense" 
> misread Pynchon and thus accuse the author of Gravity's Rainbow, famous for his 
> democratic and humane ideas, of latent anti-Semitism.  That's one reason why 
> the examples (citations) are to be hoped for. In other words, those of us "dense" enough 
> argue that it is not Pynchon's duty, nor even his business, to include historical
> events that even the most dense will admit are entirely abhorrent, but that what makes
> Pynchon a great novelist is that novels like Gravity's Rainbow and Mason & Dixon are driven by 
> some of the crucial tensions, ambivalances, and contradictions that tore America and Europe apart
> twice and threaten to tear the worls apart still. 



Yes, ambiguity raises its ugly and lovely head again and again in life
and art. In life we might try hard to avoid it. In art we can only long
to be drawn in. Second order ambiguity?

Is anyone else reading Elliot Perlman's novel Seven Types of Ambiguity?
I'm two thirds the way though it, enjoying the writing a lot, and
wondering where the hell it's all going. Explicit and implicit (I guess)
references to the famous literary essay are dropped here and there. So
far the protagonist is very down on deconstruction, Derrida, and
post-modernism. However he also seems fairly insane, so anything may
still happen.