re VLVL2 conservative values & wacky comedy

Otto ottosell at yahoo.de
Thu Apr 15 05:51:17 CDT 2004


Well done, Keith. I had a good laugh.

By the way: how many readers of "Vineland" are imaginable whose "bourgeois
sensibility" could be hurt by a Pynchon-text after "Gravity's Rainbow"?

I could imagine more easily someone whose "hippie sensibility" is hurt by
the depiction of a hippie who judges his daughter's boyfriend by the style
of his hair and isn't in fact that much different from the regular couch
potato as he himself might believe.

Who is, in fact, much more bougeois than he would admit?

Otto

----- Original Message -----
From: "Keith McMullen" <keithsz at concentric.net>
To: "Pynchon Shitlist Shitlist" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Thursday, April 15, 2004 7:40 AM
Subject: Re: re VLVL2 conservative values & wacky comedy


> >>> What does it mean to say Zoyd is a bad parent? Such an
> assertion only makes sense if you have a clear idea of what 'good
> parent' and 'bad parent' mean independently of the (any) fictional
> world. This involves an awful lot of value judgements about 'good' and
> 'bad', all the time taking you further and further from the text. This
> means using the text as a vehicle to promote your own beliefs: 'I think
> Zoyd is disgusting' = 'I'm not disgusting' = 'I'm an upright citizen'
> etc. <<<
>
>  >>> Zoyd is certainly a character designed to offend the bourgeois
> sensibility many readers bring to the text.<<<
>
> What does it mean to say, with certainty no less, that Zoyd is designed
> to offend bourgeois sensibilities many readers bring to the text? Such
> an assertion only makes sense if you have a clear, and certain, idea of
> what bourgeois sensibility
> means independently of the (any) fictional world. This involves an
> awful lot of value judgments about what is or is not bourgeois, all the
> time taking you further and further from the text. This involves using
> the text as a vehicle to promote your own beliefs: "I think Zoyd is
> created to offend bourgeois sensibilities. Many readers bring bourgeois
> sensibilities. I am not bourgeois like many readers, and I can see how
> this character was designed to offend them. They are criminal readers,
> raping and pillaging the text (unlike me who only occasionally slips in
> the correctness of my reading).
>
>




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