Pynchon & Politics( Lacey essay)

[Markekohut]

Pierce is very logistic. That is the nature of his " analysis". He revolutionized Logic. 

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On Jan 30, 2013, at 5:22 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 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.  
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> 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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