Wood's Broken Estate

[Keith Davis]

By the way, Alice, I did finally read "Bartleby", and you're right, what a
great piece of work.

On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:43 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sorry, didn't read it closely enough. I think this guy is at least
> partially full of shit...
>
>
> On Tue, Oct 16, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 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."
>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> www.innergroovemusic.com
>>
>
>
>
> --
> www.innergroovemusic.com
>



-- 
www.innergroovemusic.com
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