COL49 _Courier's Tragedy_

[Thomas Eckhardt]

jbor wrote:

> 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.

Yes. And it is not only Jacobean Revenge Tragedy which comes to mind. A
faithful adaptation of the Ilias or of Ovid's Metamorphoses for the screen
would deserve an X-rating for excessive violence, an accurate film version of
Romeo and Juliet for suggestions of child pornography and foul language (which
goes for most of Shakespeare's plays) and so on. Certainly, though, the
Jacobean Revenge Tragedy is the closest relative to non-parodic splatter and
gore movies (think "2.000 Maniacs", "Blood Feast").

> 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.

This notion of absurdity seems to be different from the earlier kind. A few
thoughts: M.H. Abrams in his "Glossary of Literary Terms" names Jarry's Pere
Ubu and Kafka as predecessors of the Literature of the Absurd and continues:

"The current movement (...) emerged in France after the horors of World War II,
as a rebellion against essential beliefs and values both of traditional culture
and traditional literature. This earlier tradition had included the assumption
that human beings are fairly rational creatures who live in an at least
partially-intelligible universe, that they are part of an ordered social
structure, and that they may be capable of heroism and dignity even in defeat.
After the 1940's, however, there was a widespread tendency, especially in the
"existential philosophy" of men of letters such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert
Camus, to view a human being as an isolated existent who is cast into an alien
universe, to conceive the the universe as possessing no inherent truth, value,
or meaning, and to represent human life, as it moves from the nothingness
whence it came toward the nothingness where it must end."

Apart from the fact that there IS room for heroism in Camus' philosophy, this
seems to be an accurate summary. The existentialist notion of absurdity is
related to the anti-paranoia of Pynchon's fictional universe (as I argued, this
seems to be the POV of  Fausto III in V.).

Aside: In Beckett, the notion of a meaningless universe or spiritual emptiness
finds expression in repetitions. But repetition, mechanization, routinization,
of course, is a major source of comedy as well, and Beckett's plays are very
funny. It is not this kind of repetition you are talking about, or are you?

Anyway, what I wanted to say was that there seems to be a difference between
the situation of Beckett's characters, who are trapped in endless repetition,
whose hope for Godot to finally arrive is endlessly betrayed, and Oedipa, who
breaks from the routine of her suburban existence and finds herself surrounded
by meaning galore. This might perhaps be seen as a shift from one notion of
absurdity to another. She now has to chose between the anti-paranoid view
(which would be roughly equivalent to the notion of an absurd universe in Camus
or Beckett) and the paranoid view (everything is staged, a different, perhaps
even new, concept of what I believe you are correct in also terming absurdity):
"Behind the hieroglyphic streets there would either be a transcendental
meaning, or only the earth." (150, I'll leave out the excluded middles for the
moment) Note that hieroglyphs here have exactly the same symbolic function as
in Moby Dick.

And this is no accident: I believe Pynchon as a writer is more closely related
to Melville than to Beckett, and Oedipa has more in common with Ahab and
Ishmael than with Estragon. The "visible universe" Oedipa is living in is not a
wasteland but full of sense impressions and signs, just as the novels of P and
Melville are exercises in excess compared to what I called Beckett's aesthetics
of reduction.

> 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.

I inwardly applauded MalignD when he pointed out that The Courier's Tragedy in
COL49 is at the same time a parody of a JRT and a parody of a summary of a JRT.
I should have named "The Evil Dead II" which might be termed a self-conscious
parody of "The Evil Dead". The comic effect, in any case, is comparable to the
one a Pynchonesque parody of a summary of "The Evil Dead" would produce.

Regards,
Thomas