Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[alice wellintown]

what is Benton's binary narrowness?

On Sat, Sep 8, 2012 at 10:31 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 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?