literary criticism laughs

[alice wellintown]

Dudious Maximus was fond of comparing Pynchon with Dante. Dante's
Masterwork is the Divine Comedy. A Comedy, a Divine one like Dante's
or Milton's, has chapters or episodes that are tragic. Book Nine of PL
for example. But the tragic notes, chapters, episodes are part of a
grand Comedy.

Pynchon is an American author of M-Satire Romance (his works have all
the elements of MS as delineated by Bahhtin and this has been
discussed in the critical literature for nearly thirty
years--Hollander, Mendelssohn, Weisenburger ...) and he fits the
tradition like a glove. His major works are, what have been called
Dark Romance, in the tradition of Poe, Melville, Hawthorne, Dickinson,
Brown ...but still Romance. Comedy not Tragedy.

The humor, Black humor, postmodern humor, is a part of the Comic mode.

The Rose, is not humor, but is Comic. We are given the Rose because
the tale is a dark and grim reminder of our own fragility, terrible
beauty, and our rendezvous with Death.




>From The Scarlet Letter:

But, on one side of the portal, and rooted
almost at the threshold, was a wild rose-bush, covered,
in this month of June, with its delicate gems, which
might be imagined to offer their fragrance and fragile
beauty to the prisoner as he went in, and to the con-
demned criminal as he came forth to his doom, in
token that the deep heart of Nature could pity and be
kind to him.


   This rose-bush, by a strange chance, has been kept
alive in history; but whether it had merely survived
out of the stern old wilderness, so long after the fall of
the gigantic pines and oaks that originally overshadowed
it, -- or whether, as there is fair authority for believing,
it had sprung up under the footsteps of the sainted
Ann Hutchinson, as she entered the prison-door, -- we
shall not take upon us to determine. Finding it so
directly on the threshold of our narrative, which is now
about to issue from that inauspicious portal, we could
hardly do otherwise than pluck one of its flowers and
present it to the reader. It may serve, let us hope, to
symbolize some sweet moral blossom, that may be
found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of
a tale of human frailty and sorrow.


On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 12:14 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Robin wrote:
> ...."tend to overvalue the "seriousness" of Pynchon. I find that complex critical analysis usually undercuts Pynchon's humor and tends to assign it to the category of—"oh wasn't that silly, now let's move on to something that's really important."
>
> One aspect of Pynchon's vision that I think I've appreciated more, with no little input from Robin et al., is that his humor/wit IS an essential aspect of his "seriousness" about life....
>
> Which is one way I view IV. Make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh, make 'em laugh.
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