Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Markekohut]

See later email after monte's about "anarchist destruction" misreading agreement.

Sent from my iPad

On Sep 8, 2012, at 8:17 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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?