More Misc. tangentially P-related

[Mark Kohut]

The father in Barthelme's The Dead Father, 1975,---he is carried around by his son---is a 'floating metaphor' writes the biographer.....stands for lots of possible things......

perhaps an overt metaphor akin to P's hidden "V." metaphor....but this bio makes clear that many, many writers in the circle of Barthelme, who edited magazines, got people published, etc. worked with the assumption that the deeper meanings of texts must not be made literal, spelled out---cause that reduced them. Seems to have been an influence from modernist poets like Eliot or the period's early postmodernism, whatever label one wants.

Pynchon was there early with V., before he lived underneath Don B...and, is, of course, one of "the deepest" buries of the deepest meanings.

The bio writer says that later, 80s, Carver came along---with his famous influential editor Gordon Lish, and suggestive "realism" was back.....

Although, of course, such as Saul Bellow and Joyce Carol Oates---both who
dissed Don. B's work---and I know Bellow dissed Pynchon's-- were another literary stream going on simultaneously, of course....

Bellow did a non-fic piece for a magazine Don b. edited where he basically argued for 'feeling over meaning"......and Don B. slyly "answered' in that issue with a "meaningful" story hiding Bellow in one of the loser characters. Interesting, of course.

And now Wood's criticisms, he who came of critical age from Carver's time, are more dominant, it seems. (Although Zadie Smith and others are a strong counterstream)