Comprising confrontations in _GR_

[Dave Monroe]

Very quickly, as I've apparently got a flooded basement to deal with, but ...
but Mikhail Bakhtin's come up a couple of times here recently, and, if I
haven't invoked him myself (esp. his Rabelais and His World) well, that
Bakhtian carnivalesque has indeed been quite the influence on my reading of
Pynchon's texts, and Gravity's Rainbow, in particular.  Ditto that (related)
notion of "Menippean satire."  Esp. in claiming GR as a sort of countergnostic
work, precisely in its parody of various generalized gnosticisms (those
emaphases on either the inward or the otherworldly; that degradation of the
material, the this-worldly; that predilection for arcana, apocrypha, whatever;
that indeed paranoiac manicheanism; and so forth ...), precisely in its
recurring evocation of that "material lower bodily strata" or however Bakhtin
(or his translators) put it.  For starters.  Very helpful indeed, and I'm only
catching up on a decade of neglected critical material, but I have that
Kharpertian book on order, and I believe I've naile down a copy of the
(out-of-print) Eddins as well.  Thanks ...

Terrance wrote:

> Here is something you may or may not find helpful:
>
> The "Modern Menippean Satire", and GR, may be read as such,
> would combine and correct, Frye's 'Anatomy and Mendelson's.
> See Eliot
> Braha's  "Menippean Form in GR and Other
> Contemporary American Texts." Diss. Columbia Univ. 1979.
>
> Here are the Bakhtin elements Braha lists, all of which can
> be identified in GR.
>
>
> 1) Carnival
>
> 2) quest-motif serves to test philosophical truths
>
> 3) the trilevelled construction of "earth," a "nether world"
> and an "olympus"
>
> 4) dissolution or merging of identities, in particular, the
> motif of the double.
>
> 5) extraordinary freedom of philosophical invention within
> the plot
>
> 6) combination of free fantasy, symbolism and --on
> occasion--the mystical religious element with the crude
> naturalism of low life
>
> 7) the concern with ultimate philosophical positions
>
> 8) the experimental fantasticality in the handling of
> perspective which can imperceptibly shift from ant's to
> bird's view
>
> 9) eccentric or scandalous behaviour--spectacular
> stomach-turning passages
>
> 10) utopian--or, to be more accurate, dystopian--elements of
> the quest motif
>
> 11) the juxtaposition of items normally distant, often in
> oxymoronic combinations
>
> 12) the parody of various genres and the mixture of prose
> and verse diction
>
> 14) the variety of styles
>
> 15) topicality and publicistic quality--WWII novel that
> illustrates ideological issues of the 1960s
>
> see also, Kharpertian, Theodore D. A Hand to Turn the Time:
> The Menippean Satires of
> Thomas Pynchon. Rutherford: Fairleigh Dickinson U P, 1990.
>
> http://www.otus.oakland.edu/english/showcase/satbib.htm