James goes to the dogs

[Mark Kohut]

Wood in my estimation values the realistic tradition in prose higher than
the non-realistic. (I am using "realistic" in the traditional literary historical sense.) Whatever Wood correctly traces, he undervalues Pynchon imho, akin perhaps to James undervaluing Dickens, it seems. (Or James, seminal in getting Hawthorne, did not rescue Melville from his obscurity then---O Herman, all those words about whales, too much, too much, was the consensus of the time)

For Wood to write that a major weakness of "Against the Day" is that it has no whale and that Captain Blicero is not a full memorable character is not to have the right "attitude" to Pynchon, I still think.(Although I find him just about the only critic to see Pynchon's "conservatism" 
along with his left-leaningness)

If he read my letter, I suggested that Melville's late still-neglected 
masterpiece, The Confidence Man: His Masquerade might be a better lens to start seeing Against the Day through. I suggested that if he reread him as many such as Leavis finally did with Dickens, Pynchon's rich genius would be seen. 

I am stating that Wood's 'attitude' clouds correctly valuing Pynchon---that last phase of reading a novel that James wrote of in "The Art of Fiction".

--- On Thu, 7/23/09, Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: Campbel Morgan <campbelmorgan at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: James goes to the dogs
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, July 23, 2009, 8:15 AM
> On Thu, Jul 23, 2009 at 6:50 AM, Mark
> Kohut<markekohut at yahoo.com>
> wrote:
> 
> > James Wood, great reader and Pynchon naysayer, has
> spoken of him (and others) under the phrase "hysterical
> realists". Bad lenses in my opinion:  not realism and
> hysterical is a loaded way to characterize outrage/satire.
> 
> Hysterical realism, also called recherché postmodernism or
> maximalism,
> is a literary genre typified by a strong contrast between
> elaborately
> absurd prose, plotting, or characterization and careful
> detailed
> investigations of real specific social phenomena.
> 
> If the shoe fits. And, it does. It's not a matter of
> Realism vs.
> Romance/Satire. The "real" is the real and specific targets
> of the
> outrage/satire. Pynchon's cartooning, Chuck Jones,
> Frederico Felline,
> Terry Gilliam . . .of characters is one example.
> Characterization, how
> authors make characters, is hysterical-real. Nixon in GR.
> Wood's, an
> excellent reader with an attitude, correctly traces the
> Broken Estate
> through Melville to Pynchon.
> 
>