V.V.(1) Carnival and the picaresque - some remarks and questions

Jasper's Selfhood lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Mon Oct 16 06:14:55 CDT 2000


Thomas Eckhardt wrote:
> 
> Is the aim of Profane's quest really "a place in society"? Is he on a quest at
> all? I have the general impression that as a yo-yo he is more or less being
> constantly pushed around by forces outside of his reach, trying to get along as
> good as he can. 

I agree. 

> 
> Stencil on the other hand, who definitely is on a quest, to me in the light of
> the quote from Reed seems to be not so much a character of the picaresque but of
> romance. 

Right on brother!


What he obsessively wants is to find out what lies at the
core of
> History, which is to say that just like Ahab he is searching for the meaning of
> the universe. And, again just like Ahab, he believes that he can get hold of the
> object of his paranoid quest and that this will provide him with an ultimate
> understanding of the workings of the world. Thus V as a multiple
> character/symbol is very similar to "the ingraspable phantom of life" aka Moby
> Dick - and both of them can be seen "far-off, otherworldly, mysterious goals
> outside society".

Right on! That White Rocket too.  


  
> 
> It is one important feature of what we call "postmodern" or "contemporary" or
> "it depends" or "whatever" fiction that this kind of literature seems to be
> extremely conscious of the history of literature as well as of the history and
> the basic assumptions of historiography. 

This may be the case, I think it has been over emphasized
generally, but, and this is what I am trying to identify
with out too many lit-crit posts: the current interest in
this subject reflects structuralist and post-structuralist
skepticism about language and about the ability of language
to refer to non-linguistic realities, and the sense that
fictionality is an attribute of forms of discourse other
than fiction, such as History and the Social Sciences. It is
an important feature of contemporary literature,
but there is simply no reason at all to distinguish so
called post modernist fiction from a whole bunch of other
periods, including the Modern, by stressing this attribute
(the awareness of fictionality and the self-consciousness of
narrative). This self-consciousness, the awareness of the
writing process and so forth is as old as literature itself.
As we discussed, it is a prominent aspect in both *TS* and
*DQ*, but these are by no means the models for TRP's
fiction. We often mention but never discuss Beckett here,
but if we are interested in the self-conscious awareness of
the writing process we should certainly discuss his work and
should certainly discuss Renaissance Poetry and the so
called experimental literature before and after Beckett. Oh
well this is a Pynchon list after all and I think Moby-Dick
is gonna slip in here and that will do it for me and it's
only V. for MM's (that's Mother Mary) sake. 


I mentioned Steven Weisenburger's book, *Fables Of
Subversion*, it's damn good, I enjoyed it, but I must say, I
cannot for the life of me, and believe me I have read up on
this stuff, get any of this postmodernism. 

"But when, finally, advancing doubt made an end of God the
Creator, there was left in being no more than the mechanical
world-system which would never have been so crudely denuded
of spirit but for its previous degradation to the status if
creature." 

					--Karl Jaspers, MAN IN THE MODERN AGE



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