CH 15 Turkey Host

[Mark Kohut]

I haven't read that Weisenburger but I will...

However, I do want to state this: whatever insight a study of 'degenerative satire' from 1940-80 OR WHENEVER can shed on IV
might also keep certain aspects that might be new from view...
(NOT that I believe this about much 'newness' in IV, but my point is
real transcendant art----such as GR; maybe ATD---o'erleaps the studies
of kinds of art it might be.)   

The academic categorizing---even, maybe especially, the best of it---has to
deal with the examples already in existence, i.e. the past. Always has been, always will be, I suggest.

True since Aristotle used Greek drama to write the Poetics and certain geniuses in every era (sometimes) subverted Aristotle's notions with their 
always-new art.

--- On Mon, 11/23/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: CH 15 Turkey Host
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, November 23, 2009, 6:16 PM
> JT sez, But is it satire or comic
> book farce or is it is really a
> serious attempt to expose the key corporate and political
> players in
> an historic fascist coup.   I could go on
> here about the parallel
> worlds of the collective unconscious and  the coming
> flood, but my
> question is whether the oft used "pastiche", or
> "post-modern" may
> obscure as much as they reveal. It is a pastiche but it is
> also
> fundamentally unlike other examples of that mode of work.
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> What kind of satire is IV? I'm not sure if I agree with
> Weisenburger's
> thesis (Fables of Subversion is available online), but even
> if I do
> agree that a new degenerative satirical writing surfaced
> and dominated
> the genre or form from 1940 -1980, I'm not certain that IV,
> or VL for
> that matter, fits Weisenburger's definition. I know that
> the current
> P-List crew doesn't like having to plow through the jargon
> and French
> name droppings that readers like Weisenburger find
> indispensible to
> their recondite prose, but if one skips the
> post-this-that-chit-chat
> in the Introduction and reads the truly insightful reading
> of GR's
> "most disagreeable" scene, once can not fail to see that
> Weisenburger,
> who wrote that famous GR Companion, is definitely on to
> something.
> 
> For those willing to plow through that Introduction, where
> Weisenburger provides a brief history of the development of
> American
> post-war satire, the problems inherent in reading or
> writing the kind
> of political satire that was produced before the War is
> clearly
> explained. Howard Hughes and JFK are propaganda subjects.
> 
> I suspect that Weisenburger, and others who have read some
> of P's
> letters and followed the development of the postmodern
> novel (McHale,
> for example), would find most of our conversations about IV
> ... a ..
> ., well .....Waste, but while we don't have much critical
> know how
> around here, we do dig into a text. And if that doesn't
> quite make up
> for our lack of knowledge about how fiction works or how
> the estate P
> inherited got broken or any of those other critical ideas
> and the
> names dropped here there and everywhere we make up for it
> with our
> total ignorance of history.
> 
> I'm just glad I've been here to get a history lesson or
> two.
> 
> That said, If we would only focus on one text at a time we
> might, if
> not solve the genre puzzle  and even come up with a
> name for it that
> is far more playful than Fables of Subversion, we might
> even learn how
> to read the next P book or even the last great one.
> 
> But, who am I to talk history or turkey, hell I would have
> voted with
> Ben Franklin on the National Bird issue.
> 
> "Or, had we but found savages on this island, the bird's
> appearance
> might have seemed to us no stranger than that of the
> wild turkey of North America. Alas..."  GR
> 
> Ben Franklin's choice for our national bird, the wild
> turkey
> (Meleagris Gallopavo) has not always had an easy time
> finding a place in its homeland. Native to only North
> America, the
> wild turkey became popular game for early
> colonists, who found easy targets with the abundance of
> animals and
> birds in the New World. As the colonists began
> to stake territory and set up farms, villages and
> eventually cities,
> they destroyed the turkey's crucial food and nesting
> sites in forests and waterways. Eventually, the industrial
> revolution
> polluted many of the country's rivers, further
> reducing endangered flocks. Turkey populations 
> declined because of
> wide-scale logging, illegal poaching and hunting,
> poor habitats and even the devastation of the Civil War and
> Great
> Depression, when food quality was sparse and the
> turkey was considered an easy catch and good eating.
> 
> "That was it right there. No language meant no chance of
> co-opting
> them to what their round and flaxen invaders were calling
> Salvation."
> GR.Penguin.110
> 
> "The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon
> the
> shackled form of a conquered
> monster, but there -- there you could look at a thing
> monstrous and
> free. It was unearthly, and the
> men were -- No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that
> was the
> worst of it -- this
> suspicion of their not being inhuman. It would come slowly
> to one.
> They howled and leaped, and
> spun, and made horrid faces; but what thrilled you was just
> the
> thought of their humanity -- like
> yours -- the thought of your remote kinship with this wild
> and
> passionate uproar. Ugly. Yes, it
> was ugly enough; but if you were man enough you would admit
> to
> yourself that there was in you
> just the faintest trace of a response to the terrible
> frankness of
> that noise, a dim suspicion of there
> being a meaning in it which you -- you so remote from the
> night of
> first ages -- could
> comprehend. And why not? The mind of man is capable of
> anything --
> because everything is in it,
> all the past as well as all the future. What was there
> after all? Joy,
> fear, sorrow, devotion,
> valour, rage -- who can tell? -- but truth -- truth
> stripped of its
> cloak of time. Let the fool gape
> and shudder -- the man knows, and can look on without
> a  wink. But he
> must at least be as much of
> a man as these on the shore. He must meet that truth with
> his own true
> stuff -- with his own inborn
> strength. Principles won't do. Acquisitions, clothes,
> pretty  rags --
> rags that would fly off at the
> first good shake. No; you want a deliberate belief. An
> appeal to me in
> this fiendish row -- is
> there? Very well; I hear; I admit, but I have a voice,
> too,  and for
> good or evil mine is the speech
> that cannot be silenced.
>                
>         --Conrad HOD
>