Pirate's batman

[Jeffrey Meikle]

Don sez:

>And as for Pirate's batman, "a corporal Wayne," I'm amazed at how many
>established critics have missed this very obvious joke.

Yep, they either didn't get it or didn't want to admit that they even
possessed the knowledge to get it.  This is the sort of godawfully bad joke
that separates Heikki's thin fit elitist Eliot-quoting '50s snobs from the
rest of us beergutted fat happy scratching post-pop-culture-deluge
preterite multitudes.  Most of the established critics who were in their
40s and 50s between 1963 and 1973, when TRP published his first three
novels, simply *couldn't* get it.  Never before had there been a writer who
dared to go from the ominous elegaic tone of the evacuation opening to the
slapstick of Teddy Bloat, or in one sentence from the moody evocation of
Pirate's solitude to the wholly pointless excresence of this absurdly
gratuitous Batman pun.  What do you do with an author who writes such
moving, evocative, heartrendingly serious prose and then immediately
undercuts it and calls his whole enterprise into question with such utterly
stupid jokes?  Clearly his seriousness must be a put-on as well.  That's
why so few people who were over the age of, say, 40, when GR was published,
have ever been able to read it.  They were born on the wrong side of the
great 1950s-60s cultural divide (which goes way beyond a "generation gap").

Jeff Meikle



Jeffrey Meikle
Director, American Studies Program
303 Garrison Hall, University of Texas at Austin 78712
512-471-7277; fax 512-471-3540