Hegel's laughing

[Dave Monroe]

... on Boris Vian, Louis Aragon (Paris Peasant), Fantomas, Landru,
suicide, et al., do, by all means, see Robin Walz, Pulp Surrealism:
Insolent Popular Culture in Early Twentieth Century France (Berkeley: U
of California P, 2000).  My favorite bit about Vian is how he died
during a private screening of a film adapted from his (in English
trans., at least) I Spit on Your Grave (no, not THAT I Spit on Your
Grave, but ...).   Might well be worth following up on, am very
interested in anything anybody might have to say about Pynchon's own use
of pop/ular culture, not to mention his idiosyncratic (?) brand of
humor, a very difficult thing to speak of, well, seriously, indeed, and
something which many commentators seem at best to merely acknowledge.
Reminds me of that apocryphal Aristotelian treatise on humor hidden away
in the monastery library in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose ... but,
indeed, that Menippean satire thing, perhaps indeed, as has been
mentioned here at LEAST reecntly, partaking of that Bakhtinian
"carnivalesque" thing (Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World) ...

Michel Ryckx wrote:

>
>
> miriam fernandez-santiago wrote: "I have been doing some research on
> Postmodern humor n Pynchoh´s work and I do not think his laughter is
> nihilistic at all, like Hegel´s. I´d rather say it is a kind of third
> dimension which escapes the dialectics of thesis/antithesis.  It is
> the option which is not in the chart, the non-visible window: just
> another thing.  Political, social or other purposes that laughter
> might have, are added purposes, but not essential to laughter."
> Miriam
>
> You may be right, but I've always been thinking that the humour mr.
> Pynchon's uses is related to the way the French Fifties author Boris
> Vian uses humour: absurdly funny and.  Could it be mr. Pynchon is
> familiar with his work (I haven't got the faintest idea wether he is
> known in the States)?
>
> Kind regards,
> Michel.
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