Ueber naive und sentimentalistische Dichtung (was: RE: airships and mellow technologies and fictiona

[Monte Davis]

Schiller sez (via Kai):
 
"In satire reality as non-perfection gets opposed to the ideal as the
highest reality. It's by the way not necessary that the ideal in itself
becomes articulated, if only the writer is able to evoke it in the reader's
mind; but this is most definitely a must, otherwise s/he will not reach
poetic results at all ."
 
Thank you, Friedrich and Fredrik, that's lovely and very apposite.
 
It provides a 210-year-old sanction for ambiguity, which we sometimes think
was invented by the modernists (or at any rate no earlier than Melville's
_Pierre_ in 1852). In debate and other forensic and didactic modes, it can
make sense to say "OK, if you oppose THIS, you have to propose something
better." Not so in poetry, or poetic fiction
 
(In the extreme, you get the Hindu "negative way" of neti, net, neti...(not
that, not that... nope, not that either...), where the ideal not only is not
articulated, but perforce cannot be. Joe Campbell used to tell about a
temple with a decorative sculptural band that was simply a calligraphic
neti, neti, neti over and over for hundreds of yards. He would deadpan:
"It's the kind of thing some people have to hear a lot before it sinks in."
)
 
In Mark's connection  -- P's ambiguity about the freedom/terror of the wide
open spaces -- it reminds us that human beings driven (or drawn) by ideals
can seem as perverse as a cat or dog who's always on the wrong side of a
door. "In Paris everything was Buenos Aires, and vice versa; in the most
eager moments of love he would suffer loss and loneliness and relish it."
(Julio Cortazar, _Rayuela_ ("Hopscotch")
 
And, in connection with the never-quite-dying topic of "Pynchon's politics"
and the Sixties and anarchism and all that...  It enhances my conviction
that Pynchon's unmistakable anger at the Pointsmen and Marvys, Vonds and
Vibes of the world does not mean he signs on with any "articulated" opposing
team: not guerrilla filmmakers or unions or dynamiters or the Counterforce
("We were never that concerned with Slothrop _qua_ Slothrop," 738)... or
even anarchists, presumably as un-articulated as they can get. 
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