Believing Too Much In Character

[Robin Landseadel]

Terrance?
On Nov 11, 2009, at 5:29 PM, wooden jamie wrote:

> 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.