sadness of america/bad postmodernism

[Sean Mannion]

I don’t really want to delve into the nonsense about intelligent design that 
comes with this thread now (let me just say I see no strand of creationism 
as even remotely worth anyone’s time), but on the ‘sadness of America’ 
discussion, I have to agree with Kevin Birmingham’s points.

Just to add for the record though, I hope I’m right in taking the last ten 
to fifteen pages of The Crying of Lot 49 (sorry, I don’t have my copy with 
me right now) as emblematic of what constitutes sadness here. If it is, then 
I see it as roughly correspondent with people like Dos Passos (upto the USA 
trilogy) and what’s going in Joyce’s ‘Dubliners’ (in a way), who in turn I 
see as correspondent with other Anglo-Europeans on this point as well (I 
always feel a strong similarity between Dos Passos and Hardy, and I don’t 
think I have to dwell on naturalism between the French and Joyce’s earlier 
things).

More to the point, I don’t see anyone as having any cultural stronghold on 
the sadness of this kind or any other kind for that matter, unless you’re 
taking ‘sadness’ to fit some kind of overly nostalgic ‘faded glory’ Irish 
drinking song definition of authentic cultural sadness. I take what’s going 
in Pynchon regarding the former to be a kind of despair at a homogenised (in 
earlier writers, homogenizing,) world. And roughly speaking, if I’m correct 
in assuming thus far, this sense of sadness and despair seems set against 
the very kinds of excluded middles someone offered earlier when taking on 
high/low cultural divisions (if anyone takes these high/low divisions as 
seriously meaningful, they should go back and have a hard think about what 
Chaucer was writing).

And while we’re all on the ludicrous aspects of post-modernism and 
‘intelligent design’, I was reminded of an article on the Sokal Affair, to 
be found here: 
http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/philo/faculty/boghossian/papers/bog_tls.html