Beating Dead Horse

[DudiousMax at aol.com]

Yo Dudes,
          You guys all seem to be going at each other a bit much, and not 
going at the text.  Some of you, (You know who you are.) set traps, lurk and 
pounce on those foolish enough to take the bait.  Others of you seem eager to 
engage in badinage and persiflage, but then escalate to a most vituperative 
level.  Trap setters, bait takers: Chill.  Or arrange to settle your 
disagreements at the gym, or somewhere you can literally batter each other.  
Who is Alpha dog?
          The narrative line has lots of implausible stuff in it.  Because, 
in Menippean Satire, characters are designed to stand for certain schools of 
thought, and the dramatic action of the narrative becomes the interplay of 
these schools of thought.  The resulting complications of the narrative are 
implausible and that is a defining characteristic of the genre.  TRP delights 
us with his implausibilities most of the time, provoking thought, getting us 
to ask ourselves why he has just this stuff going on in the narrative just at 
this moment.  But, of course, when you  play with implausibilities they can't 
be either neat and clean, or conforming to historically known facts.  They 
are like translations, of which it has been written, are like mistresses: if 
they are beautiful, they aren't faithful. So it seems with the plot: if it is 
"natural" in the sense of "naturalism" it becomes plausible.  But MenSat is 
sort of anti-natural (like Brecht), because the characters often stand for 
other things (as in parables), and we just can't (or ought not) have the same 
set of expectations for the interaction of characters who stand for "isms" as 
we have for more conventional characters in more conventional novels.  Until 
VINELAND, all of Pynchon's characters were criticized for being 
two-dimensional, like cartoons.  Well it is hard to give an "ism" a 
well-rounded, warm and fuzzy, human representation.  That is why Northrop 
Frye's notion that knowing into what genre a work falls aids in studying it, 
rings true here.
       Other characteristics of MenSat are: the mixture of humor and 
philosophy, looseness of structure, opportunities for digressions, 
introduction of verse and song.  TRP's choice of this genre allows him to do 
all the things we marvel at his doing so well, if not for the first time in 
history.  IMHO, we needn't argue about whose reading is privileged, inclusive 
or exclusive, if we can agree on which genre GR falls into.  The last time I 
brought this up it was met with a lot of stuff that didn't convince me, and 
that led to this latest round of bickering.
        Now I'm not saying that GR follows the characteristics of MenSat in a 
pure one-to-one fashion, but that keeping MenSat as a form that accounts for 
a lot of what is happening, bears fruit.  For one example, I am saying that 
Mexico and Pointsman seem to stand for competing isms.  That their interplay 
is the interplay of their respective isms.  That it is hard to also give them 
rounded personalities, or to slip into "naturalistic" explanations of the 
narrative when, IMHO it is, seems intentionally anti-natural.
         I'm really trying to keep us on target here.  I'd like to see what 
happens when we bring other characters, who seem less obviously (at first 
glance) to stand for anything, into this way of examining them.  There might 
be a lot of surprises.
         But really, what do I know; I'm only...
                                                               Max