Sontag, "Happenings"

[Otto Sell]

Stormy Monday over her (but I don't got the blues)

The most wonderful thing about this list is that it makes me re-read texts
again and again. Thanks to you all.
When I started studying "The Crying of Lot 49" my
professor urged us to read Susan Sontag's "Against Interpretation" from
1964 to have a starting point to get into new realms of reading. From that
essay I get the impression that Judy's and Sontag's view of art are not so
far apart from each other as it seems first when I read the conclusion:

"In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." The shared
satisfaction of actor-audience bears some kind of sexuality - not only in
the terms, overcoming, closing the gap between the two poles of a binary
opposition.

Good post, Robert, and "Ostranenie" even sounds a little bit like "strange,"
doesn't it. And indeed it "is of enormous importance for postmodern fiction"
and Pynchon really does so constantly.

>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.

Hard to say it better, man. The Rocket is pointed to us all, but there's
also a threat on our reality by something unreal, replacing more and more
aspects of the world by inanimate simulacrums.

Reminds me of what Wanda T. wrote about the topic and on Brecht on March 20,
1985:

"Dear Mr. Anderson:
RE: Mary Lowry's column in the March 13 AVA: the word she was wishing for,
to describe the sudden strangeness of a normally familiar object or
occurrence, would be VERFREMDUNG, pronounced fair-FREMT-oongk; there is a
Greek & French word for it too, but she wanted it in the language of
psychiatrists.

In his plays, Brecht (a dirty communist, we don't do him here in Mendocino)
used what he called the verfremdungseffekt, to break the spell as it were, &
remind the audience that what they are watching was not real. (Come to think
of it, here in Mendocino we don't NEED Brecht.)

As Ms. Lowry says, verfremdung is an experience that many people have; I
think with most people it represents a breakdown of the process of kidding
themselves that they have going on most of the time, (...)"
Wanda Tinasky
Mendocino
http://members.aol.com/tinasky/

Why don't they need Brecht in Mendocino? Because no one would come to think
that what he sees there is real.

But Robert, of course "Brecht was a pompous ass" personally as Judith wrote.
His way of treating the people around him, especially women, stealing from
other authors etc. But this is not affecting my admiration for some of his
plays, especially of course "Mutter Courage" and mostly his "Arturi Ui" -
everbody should see or read this to get an impression how the German fascim
worked basically (content), and what defamiliarisation means if done
properly in a play (form).
Plus the fact that he was a representative of the 'other Germany' - and a
human thus with human faults.
Plus he wrote (at least I hope that he did) my favorite poem, die "Legende
von der Enstehung des Buches 'Tao Te King' auf dem Weg des Laotse in die
Emigration."
http://www.itap.de/homes/otto/brecht.htm

Judy wrote:
> 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.

It's simply because he has put so much of other writers into it. Read about
it in his introduction to "Slow Learner." And it's not only Baedeker in the
early stories but philosophical and literary discourses, the scriptorium of
the enlightenment, scientific books, other fiction, literature of the real
counterculture of the 60s, poems, operas, popular songs he is referencing
to in his novels. Even his reference to a soccer game is historically
correct - to give an impression to which extent this goes - and structurally
strictly binary like Brecht or the Tao Te King, if I may add here.

No Judy, as long as you got the right questions you cannot miss the point.
And I agree with Robert in sympathizing with your frustration. But what we
can learn from the absurd is that most things don't make sense if inspected
beyond the surface and that is indeed a sad discovery.

Otto
(immer in der Lederjacke wie der olle Brecht)