GR vs. M&D (broken hysterical allegory)

[alice malice]

Looking back at these two, from what P has produced since, I suspect that
the response of the P-List to late and lite Pynchon (IV and BE) is not a
surprise. The failure to give AGTD a serious read is another matter. Of
course, some will argue they did a great job here with that cinder block,
but it's hard to argue that the readings of AGTD were as good as the best
reads of GR, M&D, VL, V. Lot49, SL, etc.
What we might call the James Wood reading of the hysterical realists began
to take shape and to wind its way through the academic world. One reason
for this is that Wood, whatever your opinion of him, of his opinions,
writes with clarity and certainty, something the academic critics,
parroting, perhaps their favorite authors of fiction and theory, can't seem
to do. Still. But the fiction of exhaustion exhausted itself in a screaming
that came across the page, again and again, claiming though it happened
before there was nothing to compare it with now, ripping the page, the sky,
the complexity that Pynchon had built, with Entropy and Gravity, with Time
and with Absolutes Zeroed. The younger hystericals, taken to the Shed by
Wood, emerged from it with essays, Confessions. So Zadie Smith, so Franzen,
confessed to obsessive list making and carnival conjuring, characters we
could neither care for nor keep the company of.

So Realism's champion clamped the crazy romantics whose songs in the
tradition of Whitman, as Wood, not an American, understood them, wrote
songs of themselves. Look at me! No Hands! No Characters, No Plots, no
Straight Lines.

So the P-List signaled up all lines but the link and the blurb.

In the beginning there was the word....and those who could make magic from
words were the Gods.

Now we worship the zero.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20140219/8b465d15/attachment.html>