The Marraige of Maule & Pyncheon (Pynchon's mesmeric process)

[Mark Kohut]

Once again, re Wood on Pynchon:

His "politics" are simply, NOT, 'explicit"..as Wood might have come to realize 
in his review of Against the Day. 

(Which he sez is NOT Moby Dick-like [no whale])

Second: he has simply not read Pynchon (deeply) enough if he thinks his 
ambiguous [see Empson] referents
point nowhere like a severed arm.....

The real world is nodded at everywhere in Pynchon.



----- Original Message ----
From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
To: pynchon-l at waste.org
Sent: Sat, September 4, 2010 11:20:02 AM
Subject: Re: The Marraige of Maule & Pyncheon (Pynchon's mesmeric process)

"It is a problem for allegory, that while going about its
own business, it draws attention to itself....Why does
anyone tolerate it?"

James Wood, _The Broken Estate_ "Thomas Pynchon and the
Problem of Allegory" (1999).

from "The Limits of Not Quite"

"I believe that distinctions between literary belief and
religion belief are important...I am attracted to writers
who struggle with those distinctions....[mid 19th cent.]
those distinctions became much harder to maintain, and we
have lived in the shadow of their blurring ever since. This
was when the old estate broke."

from "History of old estate and its development"

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.  

from "Thomas Pynchon and the Problem of Allegory"

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
(Melville). 

Obviously Wood is not talking about all of the texts of the
authors above, for example, he seems to be talking about M-D for
Melville--his exploding allegorical hunt. His chapter on
Melville, takes up Melville's "desire for God" and god and
metaphor in M-D.

Wood claims: 

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. 

Wood doesn't like the talking inanimates, Pynchon's humor, his hysterical prose, 
his irony, or his characters; he can not abide P's digressions, his evasive 
incoherence. 


He says, Pynchon  uses allegory to hide the truth, and in so
doing, turns allegory into a fetish of itself. He divides
Pynchon's readers--made by the author--as those that 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, pointing like
a severed arm to nowhere in particular." 

Wood needs to read more American Fiction and study America. Perhaps his students 
will enlighten him. But, students trained to read American Fiction as an 
extension of European Tradition will never appreciate the fact that Melville & 
Co. wrote a literary declaration of independence and everything that comes after 
can not be read with the old lenses--Menippean Satire is on pair of lenses that 
push Pynchon out of focus. While, GR, for example, contains all of the elements 
of the MS, the Anatomy, the Encyclopedic Satires of Europe, its roots are driven 
deep into Irving's the devil and tom walker. The D&TW is Faust, yes, but how is 
it an American Faust...how is America written...how do Fielder's SINS--Slavery 
and Extermination of the Indians, haunt what Kazin explains is, Native GROUND? 


--- On Sat, 9/4/10, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Re: The Marraige of Maule & Pyncheon (Pynchon's mesmeric process)
> To: "Dave Williams" <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
> Cc: "pynchon -l" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Date: Saturday, September 4, 2010, 12:41 PM
> Pynchonian essence: Pynchoen stole
> the land from young farmer Maule and built 
> the house (of the seven gables) on it. 
> 
> 
> Hawthorne and allegory. Pynchon and allegory.
> 
> 
> 
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com>
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Fri, September 3, 2010 10:09:11 PM
> Subject: Re: The Marraige of Maule & Pyncheon
> (Pynchon's mesmeric process)
> 
> We doubt research into Pynchon & Co. and the family
> heretics will produce 
> anything more than shades of gray. Pynchon, like Hawthorne,
> uses biographical 
> and historical material, not to write biography or history,
> or even 
> autobiography, but romance. 
> 
> 
> We might consider how the romance, HSG, influenced Pynchon.
> How does the 
> marriage work? Photography? The mirror? Is Pynchon now,
> mingled with Maule, 
> looking into the mirror, the Evil Genius?  
> 
> 
> We have already hinted, that it is not our purpose to trace
> down the history of 
> the Pyncheon family, in its unbroken connection with the
> House of the Seven 
> Gables; nor to show, as in a magic picture, how the
> rustiness and infirmity of 
> age gathered over the venerable house itself. As regards
> its interior life, a 
> large, dim looking-glass used to hang in one of the rooms,
> and was fabled to 
> contain within its depths all the shapes that had ever been
> reflected there, -- 
> the old colonel himself, and his many descendants, some in
> the garb of antique 
> babyhood, and others in the bloom of feminine beauty or
> manly prime, or saddened 
> with the wrinkles of frosty age. Had we the secret of that
> mirror, we would 
> gladly sit down before it, and transfer its revelations to
> our page. But there 
> was a story, for which it is difficult to conceive any
> foundation, that the 
> posterity of Matthew Maule had some connection with the
> mystery of the 
> looking-glass, and that, by what
> appears to have been a sort of mesmeric process, they could
> make its inner 
> region all alive with the departed Pyncheons; not as they
> had shown themselves 
> to the world, nor in their better and happier hours, but as
> doing over again 
> some deed of sin, or in the crisis of life's bitterest
> sorrow. The popular 
> imagination, indeed, long kept itself busy with the affair
> of the old Puritan 
> Pyncheon and the wizard Maule; the curse, which the latter
> flung from his 
> scaffold, was remembered, with the very important addition,
> that it had become a 
> part of the Pyncheon inheritance.
> 
> To the thoughtful mind, there will be no tinge of
> superstition in what we 
> figuratively express, by affirming that the ghost of a dead
> progenitor -- 
> perhaps as a portion of his own punishment -- is often
> doomed to become the Evil 
> Genius of his family. 
> 
> 
> 
>