MDDM Chs 46-7

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> 455.30 "closer to Macheath" from Gay's _The Beggar's Opera_ (458.24)
> 
> http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rbear/beggar.html

Should we put down the Ghastly Fop? 
Pick Up The Pickwick Papers? 

But what has Pynchon done with  Gray's Drama? 


We've had allusions to the play previously, but in this chapter, the
Mason and Dixon tale seems to be but a play on a play within a play. I
guess one could say that Gray's drama is the play within the play being
played on or one could say that   this sort of thing, in a novel, may
begin with Cervantes, but that's not right. Or begin in Drama with
Shakespeare, but that's not correct. 

No dusty old Greek like Plato would even recognize this postmodern
nested narrative schizophrenic shattering of the word, the text, the
character, the author, the plot, the world, the Modern reader's
conditioned response.   Right? 

If so, Aristophanes, I submit, is the greatest classical/postmodern
dramatist in the western world. 

We can now spend days on end playing with what Pynchon has done to weave
this drama into the chapter and  into the book. Or we can talk about why
it is a postmodernist thing. Or we can just move on down the line,
saying, 

Hi! Jack! 
What do you know? 

I don't nothin but what I know
and that no trade is as honest as mine.

PS thanks so much for that copy of Gray's play, the notes are very good
and a big help because the language is a bit difficult for me. 

Chow, 

T