Literature is still powerful stuff

[Matthew Cissell]

Rich,

You say that literature is nothing, surely you can't mean this, otherwise why would you be here commenting on literature. Literarture may be a cultural product and all the pomp and play that surround it no more than one of the games we play, but make no mistake, literature is powerful stuff. Ask Rushdie, go ask Orwell's ghost. You don't think Tom Clancy novels are as important as western movies for understanding a certain segment of U.S ideology? Do you think Ernst Jünger's 1924 edition of Storms of Steel didn't contribute to the rise of german fascism as much as economics and other factors?

As for Wood's attempt to distinguish between the good and the bad, and convince us of that distinction, he is only doing what he must to establish his position and garner the capital and prestige that will make him a dominant agent within the dominated section of the social field. OF course he doesn't recognise it as such, but who does?

Envy him? Well, the job doesn't sound bad, but no I don't envy him. Have you read his essay on Harold Bloom? Jimmy didn't learn from Harold. Like that elder critic, whom Wood aims to dethrone, Wood wrote a book that apparently made him look like he didn't know so much about what makes good literature; I bet he wishes he could make that book disappear sometimes, just like Bloom. The danger of critics trying to write fiction.


________________________________
From: rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com>
To: Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> 
Cc: Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net>; Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>; "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2013 4:46 PM
Subject: Re: Modern world and paranoia


why wood and company need to make such distinctions is beyond me. I
guess thats where is bread is buttered, to have "opinions" and how
awful that must be over time. I dont envy him one bit. Literature isnt
anything.

On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 10:31 AM, Markekohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> The paranoid vision is the modern Gothic? That secondary tradition in Woods' education in
> The Great English Novel tradition......
>
> Which, as Bekah points to, might be more " realistic" since the Unspeakable Gothic Horrors of the 20th Century.
>
> How important in Woods' judgment is his other word: " political" in " political paranoia". quite, I'd say....hampers the breadth of greatness of vision.
>
> Anyway, if GR is a politically paranoid fiction, which Wood might have nagging on him ( as he has now admitted) with his "once and for all" remark, then he is wrong ( partly even on his own terms because Pynchon does layer a non-political depth of Life and Life Only in it).
>
> It is also what he almost recognized in Against the Day but stepped back from. see my unpublished letter to him about it.
>
> Sent from my iPad
>
> On Apr 24, 2013, at 10:08 AM, Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
>
>> Sounds to me like Wood gets confused between what he likes and what is good.   Just because a reader doesn't personally like a book doesn't mean it's not fine lit.   Paranoia could be a part of 21st century realism the way religion was often a part of Victorian lit.  I tend to appreciate Wood, too - but I think he's stuck in the early 20th century about some things.
>>
>> Bekah
>>
>>
>> On Apr 24, 2013, at 2:29 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es> wrote:
>>
>>>    Nowadays it doesn't take anytime at all to form a conspiracy theory. Go ask Gene Rosen who helped some kids on his driveway the day of the Newtown masacre, poor man.
>>>    And now we have Boston. Several witnesses have identified the supect as the perp, video footage, and now an admission of guilt - and people claim it is a conspiracy; check out the movement to protect poor little Dzokhar from THEM.
>>>    So given all this we must address James Wood's claim (in his essay on DeLillo from the Broken Estate): "Indeed, Underworld proves, once and for all, or so I must hope, the incompatability of the political paranoid vision with great fiction." Further along he says that paranoia is bad for the novel. Hmm.
>>>
>>>    I readily admit my admiration for Wood's erudition and critical prose, however, my admiration ends there. In trying to advance his mission (reshaping the view of literature through his choice of lens) he goes too far out on a limb that will not support the weight of his ego or inflated ideas.
>>>
>>>    Now I suppose Alice might bring me up on all that but I can handle it. Waddayathink AL? Is Jimmy Wood right about paranoia and the novel?
>>>
>>> ciao
>>> mc otis
>>