Boring holes: term for this stuff

[Gillies, Lindsay]

Susan Danewitz asks:
>I had to close read that passage, and it was
>late at night, and even though I had read it plenty of times before,
>by the end I was nearly foetal.  It was a vile, painful process
>to have to read through--and I'd love it if someone would give me
>a name for the literary technique.  That of hitting the "squeam"
>button, I mean.  Pynchon loves this technique.  I'm also thinking
>of a journey down a toilet in GR...

In modern Spanish lit, the term is "tremendismo" (accent on the third 
syllable).  Camillio Jose Cela is thought of as having inaugurated its use 
(in the modern period) in his novel The Family of Pascual Duarte.  Among 
other things, this contains a description of Pascual's son drowning in a 
barrel of olive oil.  Its interesting that the violent trash cascading onto 
us from various screens (which of course never screen out, only in) probably 
de-powers this approach.

More broadly, you need to look at Rabelais and his "followers" for earlier 
examples of a similar approach, though there the tactics focus more on 
bodily functions than on self-mutilation.

To digress a bit, another concept originally embodied in the world of 
Spanish lit is also fundamental to Pynchon: the "picarro", whence the term 
"picaresque".  Don Quixote is the archetype here, the deluded boob 
nevertheless possessed of some source of grace and wisdom that ensures 
survival in tilting with windmills.  GR is certainly one of the great 
picaresque novels of Western lit.  Just another example of TRP's fantastic 
synthetic powers.