Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[alice wellintown]

Still not sure what you have in mind here, Mark, but...as anarchy has
been a topic much discussed here, and as Benton's work is, as far as I
know, is the only work dedicated to anarchy in the works of P, and
maybe one of the best efforts in the Pynchon-Industry, I thought I
would call attention to it and contrast it with what Hume says about
anarchist destruction. As noted, Benton spends a lot of time dealing
with the complex definitions of anarchy before he settles in on a very
important paradox, one that is akey to reading any P-text. The paradox
comes in many forms in P, but we all recognize it as something that is
everywhere and consequently invisible, and for the anarchists, it is
the egalitarian and libertarian aspirations which battle against
present authority (Benton cites Emile Henry, p.548, Oak Law). Benton
goes on to claim that P asks us to read as an anarchist (although I
would say that P doesn't really care if we do this, but wants the
reader to swing from postive paranoia to anti-paranoia). Do authors
tell us or teach us how to read their books? I guess some do. McHale,
and others, have argues that P wants he readers to be modern readers
under the rocket of postmodern prose. In any event, Benton describes
what happens, even to the critic or theorist or PIndustry Giants when
they read a P work. Grant, in his useful Companion to V. provides an
excellent description of the history of hermeneutic nightmares Pynchon
studies have produced.

> 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?