Wood's Broken Estate

[alice wellintown]

"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."

"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.

"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)".

 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.

And, he doesn't like the talking inanimates, Pynchon's humor, prose,
irony, characters, digressions, evasive incoherence.

He claims that 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."