The Tale of Tyrone's dick

[Tom Stanton]

At 04:14 PM 8/4/97 +0100, Jan Klimkowski wrote:
> Dennis sez:
>I'll see your phenomenological read of Barth's oeuvre and raise you one
>_GILES Goat-Boy_.

[snip]

>The reason I invoked "100 Years of Solitude" is that the novel deals   
>directly with, for instance, the United Fruit Company's exploitation of   
>Latin America.  But it does this through magic realism (which is arguably   
>a form of surrealism).  In terms both of the artistic effects they   
>achieve and the nature of their projects, I see plenty of similarities   
>between the Pynchon of GR, the Garcia Marquez of 100 Years, and the   
>Angela Carter of the "Infernal Desire Machines of Dr Hoffman" onwards.

I second that enotion. I've never understood why novels like GR that deal
directly
with politics have to be written as "realism" to be taken seriously. The
surreal
satire is the whole point anyway, isn't it? And I guess I'm old school, but
I never
read Barth as anything other than a writer's writer writing about writing (but
then I never was a fan).