PS: A more World-centric guess at other prophetic writers and books.

[ish mailian]

When I read, what is surely a contradiction in James Wood's claim that
Pynchon inherited Melville's broken estate I thought surely Wood knows
that he is contradicting himself, that allegory, as he praises it in
the white whale, is allegory as he damns it in the white rocket. That
Pynchon, a postmodern experimenter is that, a magician,  and only
that, a talent that, many critics see as wasted on showing off or
whatever it is that, as Louis Menand, in the New Yorker review of AtD
that I posted from recently, makes both reader and author dizzy as it
causes critics to wonder why Pynchon bothers with all that math, all
that stuff about the whale, the rocket....That P writes too much
Finnegan's Wake when he might write less hysterically....of course the
trend bends and Pynchon's imitators, his children, look at what Zadie
Smith and her sisters are saying about the hysterical starts to their
careers and where they write now. But this critical mantra, one that
Dwight Eddins, if I got that right, was early in debunking, that P was
a postmodern magician, has given way, thank Zeus, and P has performed
even greater magic, the poaching, as McHale has described it, is
talent immeasurable, sure, but to say, as  Wood, and others have, some
in frustration and admiration, like Menand, some in chuck the book
across the room lurches like Kakutani, but others, like critics of
Dada in Romania who jumped on the wagon and wheeled it to heaven, all
have, to a great extent, ignored the love, the grace, the anger of
Thomas Pynchon. I recall readers, some embarrassed by his prose, his
anger, his political anger, there in every book and article and story,
but clear as a bell in his prose, like this was not an author's place,
that his politics would deflate his art....so on and so forth, but
there it is.... that Rushdie would write books for his children on
pollution and global warming and the destruction of narrative but carp
about P's protracted talk on labor ....but this is Pynchon.

On Sat, Sep 2, 2017 at 9:29 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> BE and IV, Lot49, and maybe VL, though VL does dance into Japanese,
> don't, as the great books do, estrange and alienate us from our world,
> from the familiar, from the mapped and mappable, from our lives and
> the histories that anchor us in time, with a poetic vision that,
> paradoxically brings us back, as we exit the theater, back to our
> world but with a new and uncommon, distinctive and enlarged view of
> our lives, the beauty, complexity, and grace of life.
>
> So Orwell may be prescient and prophetic but 1984, a great "bad book"
> doesn't do this. AtD does.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l