Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[alice wellintown]

Not being a political theorist or a lawyer, my objective is not to prove
anything, or to make the world a better place. It's absurd to blame P for
the failure of political theorists. So, again, these provocative phrases,
are hyperbole, are hooks, a habit that they teach in college and
university, a common writing strategy.

So why did I even bother to pick on these? For the same reason I started
this thread, posted Lacey & Co.. That is, to share with my fellow P-Listers
some stuff they may find useful, or, at least, not completely useless. As
Monroe often sez, deferential, glad to be of use.

And, I hit the key points, the really good suff in Lacey, including his
argument with Wood on allegory, though, as I said, I think an allegorical
reading, as Wood presents his in -the broken estate-,  as Lacey presents
his, is limited. Romance, what M-D is, American Romance, makes use of
allegory, but allegorical readings, because they are about how the text
maps onto the world, are resisted by authors like Pynchon and Melville. It
is not, as Wood argues, that P writes allegory that, after leading the
reader to map on to our world pulls the map away. This is Wood agreeing
with the post modernists who read he works as lessons on how to read after
modernism and so on. P has strong political views, moral values, what Booth
calls norms, and these are easy enough to identify, even if we can not so
easily identify the implied author.

I'm exited to see that folks have taken up P and Peirce. A method of
disentanglement, a pragmatic unknotting out of the tangle of lines that
belong not to lawyers or political theorists, but to the people. Peirce, in
this sense, is neither scientific nor logistic; his method is analytical,
but not a breaking own of wholes into parts, but of finding solutions to
problems. Keeping in mind that, when one uses this method, the pragmatism
of it are rooted in Aristotle who admonishes that wise people do not
investigate a topic beyond what he topic admits, and, that each discipline
has its problems. So, Grover mixes up race integration and calculus and
politics in Berlin. He gets frustrated, fails, and abandons his better
ideas about the place we call the world.





On Wednesday, January 30, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:

> I was simply trying to agree with you on this point. That he should have
> read enough to know that there were others who wrote about P's politics. As
> to "political theorists"- that, Lacey says, is who Pynchon has failed to
> attract the "serious " attention of.
>
> "Pynchon has failed to attract any serious attention from political
> theorists," .
>
> So in a court of law you would have to prove that there were other
> 'political theorists' who paid 'serious attention '.  Something like that.
>  I guess in that situation Lacey would probably lose, and I suppose the
> world would be a better place for it.
>
> On Jan 30, 2013, at 12:11 AM, alice wellintown wrote:
>
> > Lacey did his homework. I don't know what you are saying here about
> political theorists.
> >
> >
> >
> > On Tuesday, January 29, 2013, Joseph Tracy wrote:
> > Yea, he really should have done his homework.  A lot hinges on the word
> serious. I think every writer who is not a pure propagandist or jokester is
> serious, and  even a fair percentage of jokesters, but who exactly
> qualifies as a "political theorist"?
> > On Jan 29, 2013, at 7:21 PM, alice wellintown wrote:
> >
> > >>> 1) I didn't get the impression that Lacey was saying he was the
> first to
> > >>> look at Pynchon politics, only that the bulk of criticism is
> literary, and
> > >>> some  political writing was, according to him, over-concerned with
> > >>> conspiracy/paranoia.  A bit too nit-picky to interest me, though I
>  agree
> > >>> that there are other political Pynchon essays.
> > >
> > > There are dozens of essays, journals, articles, and several full
> > > length studies, dissertations, and books dedicated to Pynchon's
> > > politics. There is, as mentioned, a Law Journal that takes up Pynchon
> > > and the Law.  Lacey states:
> > > Scholarship on Pynchon’s work has grown into a cottage industry,
> > > especially in literary studies. But, up to this point, Pynchon has
> > > failed to attract any serious attention from political theorists, even
> > > though he is arguably the most important novelist writing in English
> > > today about the organization of power in the postmodern world.  On the
> > > one hand, the unwillingness of political theorists to tackle Pynchon
> > > is understandable.
> > >
> > >
> > > This is how he begins. Again, claiming that one's article or essay or
> > > book is fresh and original, opens new avenues, explores ignored
> > > terrain,  is a fairly common way to proceed. But here the claim is
> > > made not five years after publication, or ten, or even twenty, but 30
> > > plus years.  Moreover, the claim is made after the cottage industry
> > > had Vineland and M&D, SL Introduction, and several other essays that
> > > expose the Political Pynchon, then two more novels. After VL the
> > > cottage industry exploded with political readings. And, of course,
> > > there were those who maintained that Pynchon was writing political
> > > sature from the start.
> > >
> > > So, again, not a key point, but there it is. One wonders how Lacey
> > > managed to miss all those other studeis of Pynchon's politics.
> >
>
>
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