Another failure to read AtD

[Mark Kohut]

Well, against Dostoevsky for the day or not, Against the Day is full of a "leading idea"
  or a couple-three of them in my opinion.  Embedding "leading ideas" is what TRP does 
  BEST, it might be said.....as he himself knows and says, his weakest short fiction was too much idea, not enough life in the writing....
   
  Stating this 'leading idea' will be an interesting discipline.
   
  An American philosopher whom there is evidence TRP has read---of course, sometimes we
  think he has read everything---is identified with this "leading idea" notion. HIs name is Charles Sanders Pierce. 
   
  

Cyrus <ioannissevastianos at yahoo.gr> wrote:
  Ya Sam wrote:
> from
>
> http://blogs.timesunion.com/books/?p=84
>
> [...]
> I think Dostoyevsky once wrote (maybe in �The Idiot�?) about a 
> �leading idea� in fiction, and it seemed that was lacking in �Against 
> the Day.� I couldn�t even begin to trust the novel and its narrators 
> (well, maybe, the narrator of the Chums of Chance sections) because I 
> wasn�t convinced there was a clear direction the novel was taking me. 
> Not-knowingness, of course, is something readers always deal with as 
> they learn more and more about the characters, places and events as 
> they read. But they can often at least glimpse or have an expectation 
> of where the novel is heading within the first fifth of a book. [...]

Reading Pynchon in terms of Dostoyevsky -- bad, bad idea...

Cyrus




 
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