hollander for the mass, part 4

[Dave Monroe]

I tend to agree with Paul's more charitable (in re:
Pynchon's mental health) reading of The Crying of Lot
49 here, whereas Hollander as I recall (paper not
handy) posits a Pynchon in fear for his life
(Hollander is definitely NOT writing a parody,
methinks).  Maybe the life of letters really was just
that much more dangerous back then (if it isn't now,
although apparently Hollander felt secure enough when
he wrote his paper), maybe Pynchon was just seriously
spooked, I don't know.  My question, however, is--and
this might well be a question to ask of parody,
parodies in general--to what extent might The Crying
of Lot 49 be reinforcing paranoia, even as, even if it
parodies that paranoid style in American politics and
then some?  Posted some stuff from Patrick O'Donnell,
Latent Destinies: Cultural Paranoia and Contemporary
U.S. Narrative (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2000) a while
back ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0011&msg=326&keywords=donnell

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0101&msg=602&sort=date

But i definitely have to run now.  There were some
other interesting things that popped up when I went
searching for my own posts, but ...

--- Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net> wrote:
> lorentzen-nicklaus wrote:
> 
> Well,  shouldn't  a "fully realized reading" include
> all possiblilities? Seems to me both Lot49 and
> "Pynchon, JFK and the CIA"  can be read as parodies
> of the mode of thinking conspirarcy theorists such
> Mark Lane use to build their cases for foul doings.
> Piling possibililty upon possibility in the often
all 
> too futile attempt to create the illusion that
> something has actually been demonstrated or
> explained. This does not require that the authors
> Pynchon and Hollander were necessarily writing (and
> therefore reading) their respective efforts as
parody
> though I'm fairly certain P was doing just
> that--merely that subsequent readers
> such as my devilish self can do so quite easily.
> 
>                         P.
> 
> 
> 
> 


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