Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Markekohut]

As if the most major writer who has embraced the Excluded Middle, rejected the pervasiveness
of The Law of, could not savage the System's evil In fiction without returning it?!?

That space between....


Sent from my iPad

On Sep 8, 2012, at 5:28 PM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

>  
> Mark Kohut sez:
> >I still think it is a misreading too.
>  
> Couldn’t agree more with alice and you. Over the years I’ve read and heard many  assertions that Pynchon favors anarchy over The System, or more broadly that he embodies [whatever the asserter means by] attitudes of “the Sixties.” Sometimes these assertions convey approval, sometimes disapproval – but most of them seem to be more in the eye of the beholder than in the books.
>  
> Certainly Pynchon is very much interested in how Systems fossilize, how they break, how new contenders arise, and especially (as I’ve said before) in historical moments when they might follow any of several trajectories. And yes, that’s when anarchists and revolutionaries (or at least wannabes) flourish. But haven’t these readers noticed how many of those Pynchon shows us are ineffectual, feckless, obsessive, amoral/immoral, sold out, or simply off the wall?   
>  
>  
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Cc: 
> Sent: Saturday, September 8, 2012 7:03 AM
> Subject: Re: Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover
> 
> > wouldn't one be better served by a statement that GR makes a point of
> > mentioning previously unmentionable facts that tend to "undercut a complete
> > trust" in those organizations, rather than 'exhibit a complete distrust'?
> > and that, like much good war fiction, it shows some of the many ways
> > that reality differs from the happy horsecrap of the jingoistic propaganda
> > churned out by ever so many warmongers and their ilk
> 
> 
> Well, to be fair to Hume, we are yet working with a very tiny excerpt
> here, but sure. But what attracts me to the excerpt is the description
> of the author/text as one that celebrates anarchist destruction. This
> is a very poor reading of the novel. And, given what comes after GR,
> works that continue to question anarchist destruction, even as they
> continue to fly towards Grace-land, a poor reading of the career of
> this author. Not that P is static. But his works never celebrated
> anarchist destruction.
> 
> Form the start, and, again, we should look first to The Secret
> Integration and to V., because there we have the sick crew of  boys
> and girls, then college kids, and international idiots, bent on
> anarchist destruction who abandon their more noble project, for the
> boys and girls in TSI, it is racial integration, after failing to blow
> up the system. school system etc.
> 
> Then to GR.
> 
> In all of his works, fanatics, and violent ones are given the harshes
> treatment, are ridiculed. In GR, for example, the scientists are
> described in religious terms, as knights in search of an un-holy grail
> and so forth. This search for a center, for pure new beginning, be it
> after the bombs in Germany and Japan, or after all the Indians are
> exterminated in America....this anarchists destruction that will allow
> for a new utopia, is ridiculed.
> 
> At the same time, of course, the novels do distrust systems and
> organizations, including, the family.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20120908/d5a3c87d/attachment.html>