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

[alice wellintown]

If so, this, and the fact that Wood keeps reading P, suggests that Wood
does get P and P gets Wood. Of course, W gets the better of P because the
parade of paranoids perforating with unreality the truths of P's books are
aesthetically satisfying to W, otherwise he wouldn't bother contrasting P
with James, but P can't get much nearly as much from W because W has little
o nothing to teach the old slow learner about how fiction

On Wednesday, April 24, 2013, wrote:

> 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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