Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Markekohut]

Pynchon answers Benton's binary narrowness all over but maybe most fully in AtD (& Lot
49 perhaps)?

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 8, 2012, at 7:59 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

>> At the same time, of course, the novels do distrust systems and
>> organizations, including, the family.
> 
> And there in lies the flub. What P novels give us are paradox. So,
> again, if we read a very fine essay on anarchy in Pynchon, where the
> author has taken a great deal of time to define anarchy and apply it
> to P novels, no easy task, we find a fine example of the Paradox of
> Pynchon in Roger Mexico's thoughts of pissing on the conference table,
> so the author, Graham Benton, with this judiciously selected example,
> explains the paradox of the anarchist destruction: how can a
> counterforce avoid replicating the patterns of existing political,
> legal, and economic institutions that serve to dehumanize us? ("This
> Network of All Plots May Yet Carry Him to Freedom"  Oaky Cit U Law
> Fall 1999).
> 
> And, this is not news to P readers or to readers of American
> Literature, as we see that the history of utopian experiements in the
> nation have been fictionalized, in Hawthorne, for example, ridiculed,
> in Melville, for example.
> 
> And, the deeper paradox of Pynchon, is not anarchist destruction's
> paradox, but can be found in Bartleby or in The Town Ho's Story; there
> it is, it is not destruction of existing institutions, of Wall Street,
> or the Church, or the Political systems in Albany, or Washington, and
> all are, along with the John Jacob Astor, condemned by Melville in
> what is, as everyone who reads it must acknowledge, the greatest work
> in American English, but a deeper Koan. That is, how do we live as
> Christ without becoing Nietzsche?