Re. Menippean satire & Lot49

[rj]

I think one of the things with Menippean satire is that it is very
obvious humour, in an earthy, vulgar,
bodily-functions-and-sex-with-animals carnivalesque-type way, and that
the object of the satire is equally obvious, particularly to a
contemporary audience, as is the case with _Gulliver's Travels_. (Which,
btw, is also a parody of the travel/exploration diary, of journeys both
real and imaginary, which was one of the most popular genres of the
era.) The first part of the definition seems to fit Pynchon, but I'm not
so sure about the second, nor about the extent and shape of the ironic
distance between Pynchon and his narrative protagonists, and that of
Swift and Melville and theirs.

Pierce's stamps described early in _Lot 49_:

> Thousands of little coloured windows into deep vistas of
> space and time;
> savannahs
> teeming with elands and gazelles, galleons sailing west into
> the void, Hitler heads, sunsets, cedars of Lebanon,
> allegorical faces
> that never
> were (29)

I collected stamps as a kid and this catalogue seems pretty apt. I
particularly remember some beautiful triangular stamps of African
animals and massive and ornate stamps from tiny little oil-rich Arab
sheikdoms. It's all too non-specific for me to find something more there
though, as Terrance seems to:

> Oedipa doesn't get it. She
> misses the puns, the
> language games, names and allusions that only we can get. In
> "projecting a
> world" Oedipa figures out that it's  "America"  "in code."
> It's up to the
> reader to break the code.
> 
> This is how Pynchon brings history up from the substrative
> reality of his novels.

But, y'see, the thing about "allegorical faces" is that they're not that
at all unless the allegory is announced and recognised. What are the
names and allusions? What history is being projected here? It's
Inverarity's fantasy escape, not Oedipa's, and he's dead. And, because
we're on the outside with Oedipa, we have no access to those worlds he
used to peer into.

best