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

[alice wellintown]

And so, Wood, like so many critics who have resisted the experimental
techniques of a generration that had grown up reading TS Eliot's ironic
love songs and preludes, had hunted down the wasteland of allusions in
modern epics, had found liberation for their individual talents from the
tradtion that shored ruins and silenced the mermaids and proclaimed it was
impossible to say just what one meant, and who found in the Beats and in
the voices that said, if not exactly what one meant, in the motel rooms,
and on the road, and out where the wondering scholars, many who careid the
last goodbye, a farewell to arms, a parade of paranoids, and with paraody
and irony they ironed the wrinkles into the free direct style. And this was
no accident, no revolution, no breaking entirely with the estate of
Melville, not in America it wasn't. No, but Wood, though he studies the
Yanks, never can quite get this. He should read Hawthorne's defense of
romance and Whitman. It is, Emerosn's parade Pynchon marches in, not
Eliot's and not James's. Tanner, as I've said many times, gets this in
spades.


On Wed, Apr 24, 2013 at 6:24 PM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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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