Believing Too Much In Character

[wooden jamie]

All the fuss about flat and round and flesh and foul/fowl fair/fare escapist
trite/tripe romantics allegorically turned inward on its own turning is a
turkey. Why make shadows of waxwings? There is still a craft of
fiction. Characters, even if we construct or deconstruct them, deny them,
defy them, brake or Northrop Frye them, broil and boil them in
 Gass's postmodern potbroiling parodies and pastiches, smother them
in smudges and drown them in sludges, are to be believed in too much to the
limits of not quite.

The Limits of Not Quiteland, where the distinctions between literary belief
and religion belief are important and where readers are still amazed with
writers who struggle with those distinctions. This is a remembrance of
things past. A past when those distinctions became much harder to
maintain; we have lived in the shadow of their blurring ever since. This was
when the old estate broke.
There is something about narrative that puts the world in doubt...it makes
belief more difficult. A story is a formal filibuster; it slows down belief
until belief falls asleep
and begins to dream its opposite, its negative....Truth slipped away. And
the novel...having founded the religion of itself, relaxed too gently into
aestheticism.

Great writers--Melville, Flaubert, Woolf, Joyce, move between the religious
impulse and the novelistic, distinguish and draw on both.

Thomas Pynchon?

*Allegory* should not be tolerated, unless it overcomes itself and acts like
fiction as it does in Kafka, Mann, Dickens or
elaborates some complex truth--Dante, Kafka, or when it explodes itself in
the hunt for allegorical truth, as in Melville.
Pynchon is the inheritor of Melville's broken estate. His novels behave like
allegories that refuse to allegorize,
*allegory* and the confusion of *allegory*, are what drive Pynchon's books
and his explicit politics.

Worse, his talking inanimates, his humor, his hysterical prose, his ironic
irony, his clownish cartoon characters, his digressions that die and gress a
funny bone, his evasive incoherence.

Pynchon  uses *allegory* to hide the truth, and in so doing, turns *allegory
* into a fetish of itself.

Pynchon's readers?

There are those who think  him a great occultist, and those that think him a
visited hoaxer.

Pynchon's novels only call attention to their own signification, which hang
without reference, like an extracted tooth that bites inot nothing in
particular.
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