The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

[cfabel]

Perhaps not oppositions but pretenses to an ideal form?

C. F. Abel
Chair
Department of Government
Stephen F. Austin State University
Nacogdoches, Texas 75962
(936) 468-3903



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Mark Kohut
Sent: Tuesday, April 19, 2011 5:40 AM
To: Richard Ryan
Cc: pynchon -l
Subject: Re: The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

it will be interesting to see, as we read, what binary oppositions continue
to hold....

I might argue that Catholic/Protestant are horses of a barely different
color, despite appearances so far, 

And plumbing this 'higher reality'...this narrator's pov that might ground
the savage satire in its moral vision against which the satire is
set...............

will be very interesting too................


 


----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Mon, April 18, 2011 5:58:10 PM
Subject: Re: The Wrecked Read. Chap 1 simple summary

Only a hundred pages in... but my thought is that The Recognitions
continually sets forth a set of binary oppositions (fake-real;
Catholic-Protestant; Christian-Pagan; Old World-New World;.....) which give
the book its conceptual structure.  The plot is advanced - and the
characters are draw into the progress of the plot - by a series of stop-time
moments and incomplete encounters in which they experience some echo of the
"higher reality" that encompasses them. So the book's over-arching framework
is a complex of dialectical antagonisms, while the more localized and
limited reality of the characters' psyches are exposed to us, the readers,
in epiphanic bursts that the narrator allows us to share with his dramatis
personae.

What we share, on the other hand, with the narrator (and presumably with
Gaddis) is the wider, more self-conscious registry of the social or
aesthetic tensions that make up the characters' fictive world. We are both
inside and outside the matrix that the characters experience as a series of
disquieting, symbolically charged tableaux.  These are the Recognitions of
the title (which would allow for any number of the Repetitions you rightly
detect, Mark....)

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 9:02 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Chap 1 introduces many key characters and also provides a  kind of 
>stakes-raising very ambitious metaphor as backstory, as history:
>America
> is/was
> a guilt-ridden Puritanical House of Seven Gables kind of country.
>
> Which Rev Gwyon sees anthropologically and the narrator sees in the 
> whole revelatory tradition of such that The Golden Bough intorduced.
>
> It all goes way back is repeated.
>
> Young Wyatt almost dies but becomes an artist; an artist who gives up 
> doing original works in order to make a living doing near-perfect 
> forgeries--imitations of earlier great artists.
>
>
> America is a country that lives fraudulently, perhaps the metaphor goes?
>
> Time, living in real time, is a positive herein, perhaps echoing 
> Eliot's returning "recognizing the place for the first time".......
>
>



--
Richard Ryan
New York and the World
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Thanks to all who saw VTM's new production!
"Brilliant!";"Superb!" - NYTheatre-wire.com www.kingstheplay.com