Was Paul M's Eagleton tidbit on THE UNCONSCIOUS

[alice wellintown]

Nope. That is not what Wood says. What I am going to summarize here in
a returns to the genre and literature distinction discussion because
Wood's point on this is fairly obvious once we give him this
distinction:

...any long-live style, Flaubert, Hemingway, Isherwood, George Eliot,
gets reproduced, is decomposed and flattened out into a genre, then
becomes a set of mannerism and often pretty lifeless techniques. So,
the efficient thriller genre takes just what it needs from the much
less than efficient Flaubert or Isherwood, and throws away what made
those writers truly alive (HFW.232).

We may agree with Wood or disagree with him on this point, but it's
important to give him the distinction if we are to follow the rest of
his argument.

He goes on to claim that most economically privileged genre of this
kind of largely lifeless "realism" is commercial cinema, through which
most people nowadays receive their idea of what constitutes a
"realistic" narrative.

Our task, Wood says, what we need to do as writers, critics, and
readers is to search for the style which cannot be easily reproduced
and reduced.

So, I don't think Wood mentions Walter Benjamin's famous essay, "The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", but, and  we don't
want to needlessly confuse things with Benjamin's idea of an "aura",
or get all those Gaddis fans on the list stirred up...and
anyway...Wood doesn't lump Gaddis in with Moody, Giles, Gass, Barthes,
others...when he argues that these authors have confused two very
different complaints about reproduction and reduction and have
concluded that fictive convention can never convey anything real. Wood
notes that this position is extreme and he quotes Barthes at length
and then ties him to Plato's mimesis or an imitation of an imitation.
That Pynchon appears on the Simpsons as a cartoon suggests that he
agrees with Barthes and not Wood.

Pynchon & Co. are hostile to verisimilitude because they have confused
convention with an inability to say anything truthful at all (236).

And so, to Aristotle, of course, we go....

The common reader has, of course, read Aristotle or knows about his
poetic ideas.






> Maybe that touches bottom re Wood. After so many "critics" in his--our--world, I think of the Leavis's and many others---went after the deficiency of our culture's "mass" tastes, Wood wants to reestablished a--the--common reader. Plot, old-fashioned characterization just like the 19th Century novel as if everything gone could be new again.