Wood's Broken Estate

[Keith Davis]

Are these your ideas or Woods?

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 5:24 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> "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."
>



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