Friends of Dorothy

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

jbor wrote:
> 
> >   From: lorentzen-nicklaus at t-online.de (Lorentzen / Nicklaus)
> >   according to my ever so humble opinion there's one work of art which is for
> gr
> >   as important as the "duineser elegien". i'm talking about "the wizard of oz"
> >   [1939], which seems to have a strutural function for the novel. furthermore,
> >   it's a movie, & cinema is the epistemologically leading art form in gr.
> 
> While I don't wish to preempt Kai I think this observation is very valid.
> The mottos for each section of GR operate (to keep the film jargon
> rolling) extra-diegetically; or, in other, words, they function as they
> would in a traditional realist or Modernist novel. Pynchon's
> eclecticism, which is the eclecticism of much postmodernist art, means
> that older traditions and modes are adopted and embraced at seeming
> whim, almost-but-not-quite parodically, even when these modes would
> appear to be mutually contradictory. (Both/and, not either/or). As in,
> say, a George Eliot or Thomas Hardy novel, the mottos here are cues
> referencing the themes and purport of the fiction; they are offered to
> the reader, vouchsafed from the author, and are quite apart (and set
> apart) from the fictional narrative per se. The mottos are often
> ironicised or ironic-in-themselves, perhaps, as with those to Sections 1
> and 4 (but this is nothing new); however, and this is new (though
> precursors even for this exist in Sterne, Melville, Conrad et. al. as
> well), these quotations have been taken (or counterfeited) from somewhat
> unexpected and what we as readers of "literary" novels would hardly
> consider to be "apt" sources, even though they function in the same way
> as in traditional fictions. It is the old low art/High Art,
> preterite/Elect substitution game, set here in a readerly context: the
> reader is "conditioned" to expect profundity of these mottos which are
> keys to what we hope and expect are this novel's deep and profound
> themes, but what this apparently profound author and novel is flinging
> at us instead is pap. Profoundly so.


Pap, profoundly so, yup! Perfect, but what I don't see is
that this is new. You say there are precursors,  that the
reader is conditioned, that High art/low art is the term we
want for this game, but Pynchon's use of epigraph is not
new, the satire is not new, the high/low is not new, erasing
boundaries of sacred and secular, as Weisenburger, with the
language of the day, calls it, is not new. It's old, old,
like back to the Greeks old.