P defends V. ...

[alice wellintown]

I didn't argue that the so-called crimes against romantic writing (see
Twain) of the ju-vee writings or the more mature texts of the author
are exempt from criticism, from the author or from any other qualified
critic, merely because they are american romances. That would be dumb.
But when you go to a low budget horror film you should not expect
Spielberg sets and when you go to a documentary film on the Holocaust
you should not expect a black stand up comic to narrate and make off
color jokes.  it's not that Twain is wrong about Cooper's bad ear. Or
that we are wrong, or that P is wrong about his bad ear. It's not that
an improvement isn't welcome. it's not that improvement doesn't happen
in P's later works. It's that it doesn't make any sense to criticize
Cooper for not exhibiting Twain't great ear. And, again, Twain's
critique of Cooper is a critique of romance itself. Cooper can not
help but exhibit the elements of romance unless he stops writing
romance and writes realism or some other form. So, we need to consider
what a particular rhetorical mode or genre calls foe before we label
it a crim or a weakness that mars a work or renders it ugly or
unreadable.

 When you read american romance, you can not expect a romantic hero
like those rooted and stable traditional figures of european romances.
The history of the american romance can be traced, as I've done
briefly here, from on native ground and from edmund wilson and back to
some key critical texts (Monroe also posted from these).

My point is, Robin is using a tailor's tape to weigh a fish. Undertand
first and criticize second. I'm convinced that Robin still has no idea
what it is Pynchon is writing; the MS (and we can not credit Hollander
with naming Pynchon an author of MS because Mendleson & others made
thid claim before Charles Hollander) reading is quite fruitful and, of
course, MS and American Romance are close cousins, but we need to get
closer than cousins so we can situate P in the American, not the
european tradition. Failure to do so will perpetuate the kinds of
misreadings that James Wood and company have advanced.