COL49 _Courier's Tragedy_

[jbor]

on 8/16/01 9:23 PM, Thomas Eckhardt at thomaseckhardt at yahoo.de wrote:

>> I think
>> that Theatre of the Absurd and Beckett's _Godot_ are
>> closer to what Pynchon
>> is up to in his pastiche of Jacobean revenge drama
>> in _Lot 49_.
> 
> 
> Absurd, yes. But not so much "absurd" as in Beckett or
> Ensslin's "The Theatre of the Absurd" as "absurd" in
> "The Evil Dead" or "Re-Animator". Not aesthetics of
> reduction here but aesthetics of surplus, so to speak,
> and this is valid for all of Pynchon's writing.

Yes, and Charles's post is very good on the way that the splatter and gore
film genres have roots in the earlier dramatic forms. Part of the whole
absurdist/postmodern thing is an awareness of this endless repetition or
incestuousness, the conscious and unconscious intertextuality of it all.
What I should have noted as the absurdist element in _Lot 49_ is the
apparent repetition of the "real" events Oedipa is encountering in the
fictitious play, her sense of being lost in some "play" herself, which she
literally is, of course, because it's a fiction which has been constructed,
and the way that this dilemma reverberates in the reader's realm as well.

But don't forget that the precis (an important point I think MalignD noted,
and I'm struck by the recuurence of the word "malign" in the novel) of 'The
Courier's Tragedy' is parodic -- self-consciously so -- in a way that
Jacobean Revenge drama and 'The Evil Dead' are not.

best