Kathyrn Hume on Late Coover

[Paul Mackin]

On 9/9/2012 9:31 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
> 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.

Benton sounds like someone I should read. I do enjoy reading GR but 
don't know if I'm doing it in the best way.  Pynchon Industry output 
generally  doesn't help much.  I don't mean this as a criticism. 
Weisenburger is best at helping--helping at stuff I'd forgot or never knew.

Does Benton talk about excluded middles?

P
>
>> 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?