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

[bandwraith at aol.com]

P does extract a measure of revenge with Pugnax, no? Not saying he's an exact match, but his refined tastes, A' and that gleam in his eye...



-----Original Message-----
From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wed, Apr 24, 2013 6:24 pm
Subject: When Irony irons in the wrinkles in Free Indirect Style (i.e., Pynchon)


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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