CH 15 the hard on

[alice wellintown]

>Joseph Tracy wrote:> > I think you have been too swayed by the style and tone to take the text > seriously.

In IV, characters are postmodern (the terms flat and round don't
really apply to postmodern texts), that is, they are not stable (they
may warp or morph or change or die and live as zombies or flash into
tube De-tox or into unconscious imitation of TV heroes and so on),
and yet postmodern texts require grave and serious analysis of their
deeply self-divided characters. So the cheesy pimp in IV is not, as
Robin would have us believe, simply a comic figure who slips on a
banana and slides off the text when the more serious political stuff
takes center text. There is no center text. Moreover, because P
elected to write a parody of the hard boiled detective genre, and
chose to filter the narrative through a single consciousness, while
employing all the other postmodern experiments with time and straight
line plottings, the text is flatter still; that is, because we see the
world, and we must read literature with our ears too--so we hear the
text as well, through Larry's eyes and in Larry's voice. That voice
doesn't work. Try as P may, Doc is simply not a great narrative voice.
What's worse is that Larry is not interesting enough to hold our
attention. Shasta is, arguably the least interesting of P's dark
ladies. Bigfoot is the Falstaff of this work, but he too is far to
Juvenile. I think that P's addiction to TV is evident in these works;
his characters are Jewish Sitcom, loud and not funny, infantile, dumb,
not a patch on the women who keep them together.