NP - On James Wood

[Markekohut]

I think this---summed up in the line about Wood seeing American writers still struggling to find a 
voice and a style ---is a superb,short essay on Wood. James as a kind of culmination of the novel
does show where Wood seems to come from---and show the kind of writers he doesn't get...

and, to think Pynchon's allegorical hand points everywhere is wrong, of course, as we plisters have shown and just reinforces that as Nabokov is always saying Rereading Shows the Visible Hand clearly...

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 13, 2012, at 5:53 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> Looking at Wood's books, I can't help but notice the irony in his
> critiques of Pynchon:
> 
> P, Wood maintains, writes for himself, to show off, to amuse himself
> with his crude and juvenile jigs and jibes. In his famous or infamous
> essay on Pynchon and Melville, Wood complains that P writes with an
> allegorical hand that is visible but pointing everywhere, and thus,
> nowhere; P's allegoricals spin like a weather vane in the winds.  The
> Broken Estate, Wood claims, makes of the German Rocket & the White
> Cock of Western Scientific Hubris (Gnosticism), an allegorical
> filibuster that hysterically screams across the stage and then is
> heard some more, and some more, and some more, as it sputters on the
> launchpad, goes whistling into the west wind, then lands with
> absurdity in the theatre/theater of overdetermined postmodernists
> proliferating.
> 
> Wood doesn't write for the common reader of genre fictions, nor for
> the academic or professional critic, nor even for the passionate
> readers of classics and literature. Wood writes for himself. This is
> one of the reasons his fictions are not worth reading. Wood, like
> Pynchon, often writes for the mirror. He is in love with his love of
> Henry James; he begins with James, claiming that one must keep cool
> but care for the cookery if one is to taste the recipe. But for Wood,
> though he acknowledges that fiction is both artifice and
> verisimilitude, too much artifice reduces fiction to a lower form. As
> I've argued here several times, Wood seems ignorant of so much
> American Literature; he seems to deny the Americans their declaration
> of literary independence; in fiction, this happened after Emerson, so,
> with the Romance. And, while Hawthorne, in one of his famous Prefaces
> (HSG, I think) cautioned authors against too much artifice and magic,
> he set down several, including HSG, that make Toni Morrison, Pynchon,
> Faulkner, McCarthy as American as Apple Pie. Unlike Tanner, whose love
> of American Literature is based on his study of and incredible
> insights about the tradition, Wood views Americans as still struggling
> to find a voice and a style. Wood insists, and it is a nice thing to
> work with, that a novel teaches us how it must be read or how to read
> the narrator; this kind of stuff is useful and easier to grab from
> Wood than from others like Booth, who does most of what Wood does much
> better. Distance, for example, and free-indirect speech, these are not
> Wood's inventions or insights, and have become standard critical or
> rhetorical tools. That Wood is correct, and very good, on, say,
> James's use of FDS and multiple perspectives, does not make him
> correct in his critique of P's use of FDS and perspectives. It is his
> preference, only. Though his complaint about DFW and Pynchon on this
> topic, how both slide into hysterical aping of character speech for
> pages on end, even when said speech is ugly, has some merit, it is
> hardly an argument that Pynchon is a Fielding in postmodern pajamas.
> Ilike Wood; there is much there to learn from, but I think he needs to
> read more about America and its rich literature if he is to convince
> us that he is writing about us and not him.