Zoyd [IV spoiler]

[Mark Kohut]

I haven't read Holton either, and I am afraid from this excerpt I do not want to.   He is like one of those academics on Pynchon who Kirn ridiculed in the NY Times review.....

I have read Molly Hite on Pynchon. She is not one whom Kirn implicates.

Holton gets her stupidly wrong......By 'static' she means history in V. goes nowhere in an eschatological sense.  And, famously, Benny says that about his own self-understanding. 

Molly is one who says that she knew a whole set when young just like The Whole Sick Crew....she doesn't buy the "not real characters' argument.

AND that is NOT abstraction as Holton's verbiage is..............
Who but some theorist would think that an historical atrocity MIGHT be reversible in order to condemn someone for supposedly saying that it cannot be----who did not say that. 



--- On Tue, 8/25/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Zoyd [IV spoiler]
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Tuesday, August 25, 2009, 11:21 AM
> Blast from the Past.
> 
> >From Holton:
> 
> There is a clear moral and historical imperative governing
> Pynchon's representation of "real" historical events and
> their
> apparent pattern.  It  can be detected perhaps in
> the way the Bondel's
> post-revolutionary song (a failed revolution) echoes in V.
> through
> decades and across
> cultures: in Porcepic's appropriation of African
> polyrhythms for white
> European modernist music (V., p. 402) and in Sphere's black
> American
> jazz with its  "rising rhythms of African nationalism"
> (V., p. 60). (336)
> 
> Here Holton continues, " While a number of patterns do
> repeat in the historical and  contemporary chapters,
> it is an
> overstatement to claim as
> Hite does that reality in V. is somehow 'static...which
> suggests that past and present exist simultaneously or
> even
> that they are reversable....in V. past and present reflect
> each other in receding vistas. There can be no question,
> for
> example, of reversing the genocidal atrocities carried out
> against the Hereros, and to suggest an equivalent to
> 'Mafia
> Winsome's intellectual racism' is clearly as
> disproportionate as is here equivalence  of Fopple's
> siege
> party (with its racist torture, murder, rape, and
> depravity)
> and the relatively mild bohemianism of the Whole Sick
> Crew.
> This response to the novel is quite common, however, and
> results from approaching it as an abstract philosophical
> statement or an epistemological puzzle (albeit a puzzle
> that
> may not allow the possibility of a solution) to the
> exclusion of the concrete social and historical detail.
> 
> Holten begins his essay by noting this blind spot in
> Plater's *Grim Pheonix*
> 
> Holton's essay, have not read the book, only the essay,
> has
> a few errors, minor, but
> since he notes the national origins of the characters to
> support his thesis, this should be corrected. Fergus is
> Irish, Armenian, and  Jewish, not Irish American
> Jewish, and
> Benny is Jewish on his mother's side and Italian- Roman
> Catholic on his father's side, not Irish and Jewish as
> Holton states in his essay.
> 
> 
> The recurrence of mirror imagery in discussions of V. is
> symptomatic of a prevalent problem in postmodernism: the
> possibility that an
> acceptance of relativity entails a trivializing of
> interpretation.  (336)
> 
> A dangerous tendency of cultural relativism, Fabian adds,
> is
> the fact "that such mirrors, of placed at propitious
> angles, also have the
> miraculous power to make real objects disappear." (336,
> citing Fabian, Time
> and the Other, pp. 44-5]
>