Pynchon & Roth thread

[Mark Kohut]

You are probably right about wooden Jim's head for rereading but a guycan have 
hope, yes?   Leavis surprised.....

I do not think Wood is correct in his judgment of Pynchon. I think Tony Tanner
was; Tony who also wrote, almost offhandedly, "character is not what we look to 
Pynchon for"........[it is in City of Words] ...
yet thought his first two books very powerful   .... 
then came GR......Tanner knew all those astonishing words mattered more than 
characters.....

Wood if he falls to the 'affective fallacy' sometimes, does so in my opinion 
because
he thinks human beings in fiction as he can feel and understand them from the 
consensus
wisdom of psychology today----I could cap those words to make my satiric 
point......
and has no real room for some conception of human nature that goes further back, 
or deeper,
so that part of the artist's theme is lost qualities....man without qualities, 
society without qualities and worse. 


Look up affective fallacy in wikipedia----from Ovid on, they who fall into 
it underestimate Myth, language, ideas.....

And, he has read too many novels and not enough philosophy, deep social thought, 
etc., etc.

He can't handle ideas right in fiction; at base thinks they do not 
belong supposedly infusing fiction. 

And, savage satire? Perhaps of some European countries that aren't England....

That Blicero is NOT like Ahab? Which one is NOT like the other ones????

I would bet my Flux Capacitor, Wood would have been one of the Moby Dick 
naysayers were he contemporary....of course,
Finnegan's Wake....Pound, maybe even The Wasteland....



 


----- Original Message ----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, May 11, 2011 5:25:24 PM
Subject: Re: Pynchon & Roth thread

Wood Jim is not goin to change his reading even if he does go and read
the book again. Paul hit it on the wood; Wood doesn't like the way
Pynchon & Co. responded to, for lack of a better phrase. "The Broekn
Estate." I think wood is correct in his reading of Pynchon. Pynchon
does exactly what Wood says his does. But Wood is victim of the
Affective fallacy. But that's how he gets his traction and I like Wood
for this. He does, as Paul notes, slip into some wierd colorful mush
from time to time, but all good critics do that.

On Wed, May 11, 2011 at 10:50 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Paul writes:
> I suspect that Wood's reservations about the character Blicero would be
> in the nature of what if anything he stands for.  He thinks P
> over-allegorizes into meaninglessness.
>
> yes, and he thinks P undercharacterizes into vacuity...'all hat, no cowboy' to
> spin that line around a bit....
>
> Re: over-allegorizing: he just hasn't sat and encountered him whole.
> "who said it should be easy?", said TRP.
>
> In that letter i told him that if he got around to rereading Against the Day
> and the others, as the similar critic Leavis did re Dickens, he would raise
> pynchon to the canon as Leavis did Dickens late in his career...........
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Paul Mackin <mackin.paul at verizon.net>
> To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>; pynchon-l at waste.org
> Sent: Wed, May 11, 2011 10:25:14 AM
> Subject: Re: Pynchon & Roth thread
>
> On 5/11/2011 9:38 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
>> P writes:
>> I'm not sure sure I wouldn't quite enjoy a book full of Blicero.  He was a
>> pretty marvelous creation.
>>
>>
>> which focuses something quite perfectly, I think. The great (and yet greatly
>> limited) reader, james wood--we
>> call him a 'critic' said in his review of Against the Day that that book had
> no
>> white whale and also that, whatever he was, Blicero was no Ahab and therefore
>> NOT unforgettable (as a character, he meant, of course)
>>
>> In my letter I told him, among other things, that Blicero was
>> unforgettable......
>>
>
> I suspect that Wood's reservations about the character Blicero would be
> in the nature of what if anything he stands for.  He thinks P
> over-allegorizes into meaninglessness.
>
> Wood admires Pynchon's language pretty much without question.  (I think)
>
> Wood seems to me  a very unstraightforward writer.  Very un-Roth-like.
> I often have to stop and ask myself what is he even saying.
>
> P
>
>