Tristan and Isolde

[lorentzen-nicklaus]

 even if true, this, of course, would not change at all the crucial issue 
 (sexual perversity as mechanism of the historically increasing enfetishment of 
 the inanimate?) of my question. 

kfl //:: ps: terrance, please put your little brother "big one" to sleep. he 
             sucks.

> http://pages.whowhere.com/internet/f.vazquez/reviewgr.html
>
> Locke was on to it in 1973. Three years prior to Eddins
> ground breaking book, Thomas Moore, in his book *The Style
> of Connectedness* came to exactly the same conclusion. 
>
> Weisenburger, who, to barrow Dave Monroe's phrase,
> "disagrees violently" with the book's 
> conclusions, see his own book *Fables of Subversion*, wrote
> the dust jacket blurb, praising the book. James Wood, in his
> book, *Broken Estate*, agrees mostly with Weisenburger, but
> takes the opposite opinion, while agreeing with
> Weisenburger, although we need to understand how both
> re-define the terms "Fable,"and  "Allegory," and the use of
> techniques like irony and so called "black humor,"  that
> Pynchon writes a postmodern "fable of subversion,"  Wood
> takes Pynchon to the wood shed for doing so. 
>
> Wood concludes his study of Pynchon thus: 
>
> "What is left are novels that draw attention only to their
> own significations, which hang without reference, inflamedly
> pointing like a severed arm to nowhere in particular."
>
>
>
> The majority of P's critics, and yes I have read the vast
> majority, do not agree with Siegel's reading of Blicero.
> However, disagree as they might and as mightily and even as
> violently as they disagree, they do attribute these
> disagreements to the other critics "phobias" and "biases." 
>
> There are lots of ways to read Pynchon. 
>
> K. Hume's study of the construction P's characters in P's
> fiction is of some use here:  
>
> Thinness of character in Gravity's Rainbow disquiets even
> the book's partisans. Pynchon confounds us with an opulent
> Ulyssean world but denies us the filigrain
> complexity of Joyce's psychological portraits. Weissmann's
> squalid attempts to
> transcend, for instance, glisten darkly in the ashes of the
> Zone, but Pynchon does not
> ground that quest in the psyche of the individual--a
> puzzling failure by the standards of realistic literature. 
>
> Pynchon's mode of constructing characters is addressed to
> the problems of such
> people. Now as much as any time in the past, we need
> generalized thinking about what
> it means to be human and about the ordinary concern of how
> to survive, because we,
> too, live in the postmodern world. To overlook this
> conservative moral and prophetic
> strain in Pynchon's endeavor because we are intellectually
> drawn to the radical and
> postmodern is to impoverish our experience with the
> complexity of his text.
>
> Hume, neither a xenophobe, nor a homophobe, has no
> difficulty noting that Weissmann provokes revulsion.  
>                                                              
>
> I made the distinction between the symbolic use of sexual
> practices, tropes, metaphors, and the lives and practices of
> real people. I have always maintained that Pynchon is a
> satirist, I agree with those that find his characters are
> for the most part flat, but also agree with those critics
> that have worked to defend these characters, not as human
> people, but as Satirical players on Pynchon's grand stage
> where the film is always flickering the lightness and
> darkness of consciousness on the screen and melting into the
> painted scenery and at any moment a troupe of his most
> amusing mimes and machines, who have been waiting in the
> wings, parade onto the stage singing dirty little ditties to
> relieve us of the burden of complicity and bad shit and
> tickle us away, if only while we join in and sing, form the
> whispering horrors and the folly of being only human after
> all. 
>
>  Those that take this approach have no difficulty
> recognizing that their "condemnation" of evil actions on the
> part of characters like Pointman and Weissmann, are not
> judgments, condemnations,  of cultures or peoples. The
> German in GR, even Weissmann,  is not other worldly and
> gnostic, he is US,  and we are all together. Blicero is evil
> and we all know why.