IVIV Hope Harlingen: ( spoilers)

[umberto rossi]

On 11 Sep 2009 at 21:17, alice wellintown wrote:

> its comedy and humor are beyond the kind of corrective laughter typical
> of traditional literary satire and oesubvert hierarchies of values and
> reflect suspiciously on all ways of making meaning, including its own. 

Listen, madam, I want to make it as clear as I can. Everytime a new 
bunch of writers comes up a new bunch of critics starts working on 
them and try to explain why those new writers are sooooo new and 
why they're worth reading and that you're missing sooo much if you 
haven't read them. That's the attitude of Weisenburger and all the 
other critics who have "discovered" Pynchon & Co. and had to 
somewhat endorse them. Obviously such critics have to say that 
these soooo new writers are beyond this and beyond that and that 
they've opened a new age of literature and went beyond some 
borderline and done what had never been even dreamed before. 

This is respectable literary hype, it's what can be expected by 
pionieers, who--being pioneers--have the frontier in their mind and 
why shouldn't they? But Pynchon himself told us quite clearly in 
Against the Day that the frontier does not exist anymore. He told us 
that by quoting Frederick Jackson Turner's speech delivered at the 
Chicago World Fair which is the first place conjured up by Pynchon. 
What did FJT tell Americans there and then? There's no more 
frontier, the frontier is over, finita! 

Postmodernist fiction is nothing new now, after 50 years (more than 
60 if you remember it all started with Borges), and such statements 
smell a bit stale:

"This because these readers distrust metafictional humor and comedy 
and/or refuse to acknowledge that the  joke they cannot get is on  
them. "

Metafiction? Again? Readers distrust metafiction? Maybe because it's 
new? It ain't new, ma'am, Shakespeare was the supreme Metafictionist, 
even with metafictional humor if you please. 

I don't think that one should necessarily see Pynchon's characters as flat 
and made of paper just because we have had all this talk of 
metafiction 40 years ago. And I think we should try to understand that 
metafiction doesn't explain everything. If Pynchon were just somebody 
poking fun at his readers, I don't think anybody would stomach more 
than 4000 pages of his stuff. 

Surely he's a comic writer, a satyrist, whatever. But he is not deprived of 
feelings and passions. And by "he" I mean Pynchon the Man, Pynchon 
the implicit author, plus all his literary avatars. IV is definitely a funny 
book which manages to make me laugh now and then, but it has 
moments of deep emotive tremors. And its characters are not exactly 
made of paper.
_____________
umberto rossi

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