Exhaustion

[Steelhead]

Grant from Newcastle, a fellow Seamus Heaney fan, continues the parry:

>>I don't like Barth all that much, but the Sotweed Factor was hardly stale.
>But that was my point.

Then I misunderstood the thrust of your argument. I thought you were saying
that Pynchon would write a more invigorating parody of an 18th century
novel about Maryland than Barth. My question is why another parody, when
its already been done so perfectly. I know next to nothing about literary
history. Indeed, I am barely literate by post-modernist standards. But
wasn't Laurence Sterne writing parodies of these things back in the
1760s--give or take a decade or two.

>What Barth was saying in the Literature of Exhaustion was that if the novel
>is dead or if literature is exhausted, he can write books about that.

And that was a profound thought, wasn't it? Did he write that before or
after Beckett wrote Watt. Barth is mainly a professor, writing about
writing about writing. The Sotweed Factor, Chimera, and Floating Opera were
good books. But for the past twenty years Barth's been the biggest bore on
the eastern seaboard.

Some critic of Pynchon's--Tony Tanner, I think--once said that he read the
final paragraphs of Gravity's Rainbow as a secret message that TRP would
never write again for publication. I hope Tanner's right. Indeed, I believe
he is right. Pynchon didn't write the awful Vineland. It was actually
written by Wanda Tinasky. Pynchon's been dead for many years. Those hit
squads that got Farina caught up with Tom back in the late 70s. That photo
in New York magazine looked nothing like TRP. This forthcoming book is a
hoax. It was actually a collaborative effort between Steve Erickson and Ron
Rosenbaum.

Steely

A vacuum of need
Collapsed each hunting heart
But tremulously we held
As hawk and prey apart,
Preserved classic decorum,
Deployed our talk with art.

Seamus Heaney
from "Twice Shy"