The Courier's Tragedy

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Not a specific reply to Judith's posting.

I thought it was interesting that Wharfinger claims that the "Courier's Tragedy"
was "written to entertain people. Just like horror movies." (Harper, 60) If I am
not mistaken, the first horror movies graphically depicting scenes similar to
the ones in "The Courier's Tragedy" were created around the time of the
publication of COL49 by Herschel (sp?) Gordon Lewis, the grandfather of the
splatter movies of the 70s and 80s. Pynchon's parodic summary of the action of
the play is absolutely hilarious and reminds me of "The Evil Dead II", Stuart
Gordon's "Re-Animator" and Peter Jackson's "Brain Dead" - not to mention "Bad
Taste" - which are parodic in themselves. The artistic sensibility at work here
seems to be far ahead of its time.

More to the point, I think it is marvellous how Pynchon manages to evoke some
sense of real menace out of a play he describes as the Jacobeans' version of sex
and crime. Blood and gore is not the point, the narrator seems to imply, this is
just entertainment. The real threat is history, which finds expression
everywhere from postal stamps to silly and incredibly violent revenge tragedies.
You look into the past like Oedipa, and you'll find the past staring right back
at you. But perhaps, you'll have to consider, this is just an illusion...

Thomas

"I've been set free/to find a new illusion."
The Velvet Underground