Sontag, "Happenings"

[jbor]

Hi Judith

While I sympathise with your frustrations, I do think it is difficult to
downplay Pynchon's place in 60s American culture, of which Susan Sontag is
perhaps one of the most eloquent and insightful spokespersons. Recall that
Pynchon has written a very respectful and admiring intro to a collection of
Don Barthelme's writing, admitted to being enamoured of the Beats and the
paintings of Remedios Varo (see a nice catalogue at

http://aries17.uwaterloo.ca/remedios/expo.html

and that he wears the literary influence of Borges, Nabokov and the Latin
American magic realists somewhat on his sleeve, in *V.* in particular -- all
of these being significant to the anti-Modernist impulses of 50s and 60s US
(counter-)culture.

And I guess I don't agree with your glib dismissals of Brecht and Artaud
either, and I sense that the fact that you don't like either of these two
playwrights (or Sontag's definition of comedy, though I agree that that
paragraph does seem to limit itself to one particular style of comedy) has
something to do with your own definition of and tastes in comic drama. The
viewer's reaction to Brecht's and Artaud's work was *meant* to be a very
visceral one I think. And, if you look back through the history of modern
theatre, through the theatre of panic, Theatre of the Absurd, theatre of
silence, Theatre of Cruelty, surrealism, Jarry (and, through him, to de
Sade) -- back to Strindberg, Chekhov and Ibsen, back even to commedia
dell'arte, in fact -- the avant garde has constantly been engaged in a
process of inventing new ways to break down that fourth wall between the
stage and the viewer, to "stir the audience from its cozy emotional
anaesthesia". The Dadaists did it with insults and chaos. Pirandello did it
with intimations of madness, illusion and isolation. Artaud did it with mime
and grand guignol. Beckett did it with boredom and meaninglessness.
"Happenings" did it, partly, by the physical inclusion of the audience in
the performance. Stoppard did it with mirrors. Seinfeld did it with
"nothing". But the dilemma has always been that once the shock of the
unexpected has passed it becomes sublimated by the viewer, normalised;
context is restored and the theatrical experience is again an "us and them"
routine, safely escapist. So, I guess it's more about finding something
"new" -- avant gardism in itself -- than trying to define what is
universally comic.

Brecht's "alienation effect" (Verfremdung) is of enormous importance for
postmodern fiction. Brecht wrote of it in 1931:

   The A-effect consists in turning the object of which one is to be made
   aware, to which one's attention is to be drawn, from something ordinary,
   familiar, immediately accessible, into something peculiar, striking and
   unexpected. What is obvious is in a certain sense made incomprehensible,
   but this is only in order that it may then be made all the easier to
   comprehend. (*Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic*, 1964,
   pp. 143-144)

This idea bears many similarities with Viktor Shklovsky's notion of
"defamiliarisation" (ostranenie) but carries it a step further because it is
conceived as a process through which meaning is ultimately enhanced.
Shklovsky was the Russian Formalist guy who observed that Sterne's *Tristram
Shandy* "is the most typical novel in world literature". For both Shklovsky
and Brecht disruption and reorientation to the text are engendered by the
disclosed artifice of the medium itself. Pynchon does this constantly, and
you need only consider the way the reader is drawn into the narrative and
abused in *GR*: the fat, complacent crowd dozing and farting at the opera
which Gustav rants about; those tourists gawking at the opium-addicted Chu
Piang, out with Tchitchy in the Kirghiz lands; the commentary re. "the
Abreaction of the Lord of the Night"; to see it. Confronting that abreactive
essence of comedy -- that laughter of relief which comes from watching pain
or tragedy inflicted upon another, that Acme detonator blowing up in Wile
E's face, or Larry and Curly getting their heads bonked together, or someone
slipping on a banana peel -- is often what it's all about in Pynchon too. So
what I would say the self-consciousness about being a spectator in Pynchon's
text sometimes does is to confront the reader with the "emotional
anaesthesia" to which she or he is accustomed when responding to a literary
narrative, that comfort zone of aesthetic experience which instinctively
discriminates between what is "real" and what is not.

Just noticed, by the way, that the term théâtre panique was invented in 1962
by Fernando Arrabal, a Spanish-born playwright (in the Artaud/Beckett
mould), film director, actor and chess aficionado, who writes in French. He
is very much a contemporary of TRP's, his work shows the influence of
surrealism and magic realism, and in 1959 he visited the U.S. to receive a
Ford Foundation award. In his plays he "sought to create a kind of
ritualistic drama which combines elements of tragedy and buffoonery with
religious (or quasi-religious) ceremonial. It is intended to surprise and
frighten as well as to arouse laughter."

http://www.infoplease.com/ce6/people/A0804818.html
http://www.uky.edu/UniversityPress/books/festplay.html
http://eonline.com/Facts/People/0%2C12%2C39243%2C00.html
http://cledar.ch/arrabal/
http://jinx.sistm.unsw.edu.au/~greenlft/1994/154/154p24b.htm

That name certainly rings a bell (or, at least, stirs a clear soup with a
chicken foot).

best

(ps. Ned's Atomic Dustbin is also the name of a great Brit. band.)


----------
>From: "Judith A. Panetta" <judy at firemist.com>
>To: "pynchon-l at waste.org" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>Subject: Re: Sontag, "Happenings"
>Date: Mon, Oct 30, 2000, 4:55 AM
>

> Help me out here. I'm struggling with Dave's post (as I do
> with many plist). I believe my difficulty stems from my
> relationship to "the work" (art in general-pynchon in
> particular) that is visceral and the deconstructivist views
> presented on the list. This particular post resonates with
> me because of Sontag's definition of comedy. Please bear
> with me as I try to stumble through this and forgive what
> may appear to be ignorant or irreverent.
>
> A little background. I was a theater director for oh over 20
> odd years. As a youngster I went through phases-poking at
> this and that-subjecting poor audiences to my intellectual
> meandering. I came up with a few conclusions: Brecht was a
> pompous ass and Artaud was mad, among other realizations.
> This was a process, I guess. The discovery of what makes the
> activity satisfying. For me it was an abandonment of the
> intellectual and to react emotionally to the text. Like sex,
> theater was  most successful when the satisfaction is shared
> by both the presenters and the audience. This is where I
> start to have problems with Sontag. Her explanations of the
> "happening." I played that game. It was a superficial
> experience. I would agree that there is a place for
> "stir(ring) the modern audience from its cozy emotional
> anesthesia." Although I would caution that this phrase
> refers to a particular audience-a specific socioeconomic
> group. I get peeved with these categorizations-they're
> narrow, often bigoted.
>
> We all seemed to be most gratified by emotional response to
> the vagaries of life on a basic level, as compared to the
> "happening" made manifest by arbitrary outbursts often
> without context, let alone conflict. This wears thin and
> becomes tiresome.
>
> I'm not just talking about the traditional linear narrative
> as being the be-all and end-all. (Found this tiresome as
> well.) I'm speaking purely of emotion response to
> conflict-in whatever genre.
>
> And finally let me get to the meat of all this prattle. I
> take great exception to this:
>
> [snip] "In the heart of comedy, there is emotional
> anesthesia.  What permits us to laugh at painful and
> grotesque events is that we observe that the people to whom
> these events happen are really underreacting.  No matter how
> much they scream or prance about or inveigh to heaven or
> lament their misfortune, the audience knows they are really
> not feeling very much.  The protagonists of great comedy all
> have something of the automaton or robot in them."
>
> This statement is so strange, so out of my experience.
> Comedy is differentiated from tragedy by incongruity. If
> anything it is the negation of invulnerability. A character
> engages an audience by being sympathetic, offering resonance
> on an emotional level. The conflict is presented and it is
> the unexpected response or reaction that makes us laugh.
> That this response may appear to be robotic does not
> indicate lack of feeling. How many examples can we cite?
> Roadrunner and Wile E.? (The incongruity lying in the
> defiance of the physical world: you don't fall from the
> precipice until you look down.) The Goon Show? (Ned's Atomic
> Dustbin-one of my faves-the characters' "sensible" response
> to nuclear war.) Lysistrata?
>
> Sontag's explanation is frustrating, if not just sad. Like
> many analytical texts, hers seems to lose the "heart" of the
> issue as well as  missing (or a refusal to acknowledge) the
> impulse that creates art. It doesn't come from the head, but
> from another place.
>
> And so much for my own blah, blah, blah.
>
> My fellow contributors...why does it seem that you seem to
> be reacting to Mr. Pynchon's work vicariously through other
> writers. I'd be much more interested in how you feel about
> it.
>
> Am I missing the point?
>
> Thanks, judy