When Irony irons in the wrinkles in Free Indirect Style (i.e., Pynchon)

[alice wellintown]

Wood is a Formalist, so critiques of his readings of P and others, like
DFW, or of his debate with other formalists or
with ex-formalists-cum-structuralist (i.e., Barthes) are useful when they
acknowledge this and take him on on his own terms.

 If he confuses his likes with his formalism, well, that doesn't matter.

He argues that James, not because he didn't have the skill, imagination,
brilliant perceptions about the fraility and subtlety and fluidity and
shadowy nature of consciousness, and certainly not because he lacked
the playfulness with style that a late 20th C modern or postmodern author
commonly employs with free indirect, isa better writer than these late
moderns because of what he doesn't do.

So, the example given, contrasting PoL with GR, certainly supports the
argument presented, and it clearly takes Wood on on his own terms, on his
own formalist field.

But, when we examine Wood, and his complaints, we see the other side of the
GR passage, that is, when the prose runs hysterical, when the ironic
dipping into consciousness irons wrinkles into the effort to seamlessly dip
in and out and into and out of the shadows & Co., when the author or
implied author, who can, as Booth says, hide but never disappear, is
spliced into the character, with language that turns the irony upon itself,
calling attention to itself at the expense of the narrative, the style, and
all he elements of fiction making. It is not a matter of
self-consciousness, or of swooping in an out of the many consciousnesses,
or the skipping of these across the surface, or diving deep, but of
fracturing with irony so that a broken allegory is shored against the ruins
of nothing but words, words, words. It makes one wish that the old wind bag
Polonoius might be made a Lazarus come back to tell Hamlet that his school
chums are alive in a play within his playfulness and that the matter is a
whale or ver much a camel.
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