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

[Joseph Tracy]

I agree with Mark here that the real is very much what Pynchon is  
pointing toward. And I must be fucked up because that feeling of  
encountering a "real" that is as big and complicated and strange and  
ambiguous as the real I experience in my life is why I like reading  
Pynchon novels.
  Is Wood really saying myth/metaphor/representative characters( what  
he calls allegory)have no role in how we interpret and describe what  
we call real. This is to disable the nature of the language we  
inherit ( with its wide range of storytelling and  truthtelling  
traditions and techniques and it's inherent ambiguity)  and impose a  
narrow way of using that language as normative and "real".


The problem with Wood's argument is that  failing to prove that  
Pynchon is writing Allegory with a capital A or the kind of allegory  
he likes and approves of ( Mann, Kafka, Dickens, possibly Melville)  
he proposes his personal discomfort  as adequate guide to categorize  
and dismiss  the work and its role in literary history.

In response to Terrance Dave Alice and the rest of we.
Important non-american influences on the work of T Pynchon: Dickens,  
Swift, T.S. Eliot, Rilke, European history in Africa, The great game  
preceding WW1, Jung, Freud, Dante, The Bible, Church history  
including history of Heresies, Tarot, Spiritualism, mythology of  
Greece and Egypt and the Steppes, Pythagoras, history of Anarchy, the  
history of underground and hidden worlds and a hollow earth, history  
of Science and Math, Buddhist  and Taoist spiritual ideas...
My point is that Pynchon consciously  embraces the whole of human  
history as informative and worthy of our attention and refuses the  
myth of American uniqueness and self invention and the novelistic  
navel gazing in rapt wonder at our special American soul.

Is Moby Dick an important influence? Absolutely. Are Moby Dick  or  
the Education of Henry Adams the models for all that  Pynchon  
writes?  IMHO no fucking way.


On Sep 4, 2010, at 12:16 PM, Mark Kohut wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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>
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