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

[alice wellintown]

Correction: s/b.   W gets more from P.  Not.  W gets the better of P

On Wednesday, April 24, 2013, alice wellintown wrote:

> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130424/4fcc2ea5/attachment.html>