IVIV Hope Harlingen: ( spoilers)

[alice wellintown]

Tore Rye Andersen wrote:
>
> Umberto Rossi questioned this statement of Alice's:
>
> "This because these readers distrust metafictional humor and comedy
> and/or refuse to acknowledge that the  joke they cannot get is on
> them."
>
> I absolutely agree (with Umberto, not the Alicism). Listen, we've
> all read John Barth's Lost in the Funhouse, and chuckled along with
> its 'radical critique' of our old, naive realistic expectations. Wow,
> a story whose title is 'Title'! How innovative. How radical! How naive
> of us to expect a story with a traditional title. The joke sure is on
> us!
>
> Been there, done that. But metafiction's getting really, really old.
> Metafiction by now is just as much a convention as the Realism it
> was trying to debunk, and the idea that educated readers can still be
> fooled by metafictional humor is, well, pretty naive.

It's not a matter of been there and done that because the works, the
satires, like IV, are still there, still doing that.  If IV has moved
on from the "metafictional convention" I'd sure be interesting is
learning what's he's moved on to. Tell us and explain, please.  But
that's not why I posted the Weisenburger stuff or the South Park
stuff. It's weisenburger's thesis that helpful, not the terms or the
conventions.


>
> The ironical reader has the easiest job of all: He can always posit
> yet another ironical frame around those moments of tenderness, passion,
> anger, kindness etc. that 'naive' readers find in the novels. But I
> suspect the real joke may be on the masterful ironic reader who can
> always debunk the findings of others with a cynical smirk: He always
> finds the same underlying (and frankly reductive) message in each and
> every novel, and he doesn't really know what he's missing.

Actually, as I posted previously wrt Booth's Rhetoric of Fiction, when
shades of grey, both/and and other perspectivisms and relativisms
dominate discussions and debates about ironic literature, the critic
with the most ironic reading wins. This, is a problem. That said, it's
not a matter of reductive cynical readings by masters of irony
dominating naive traditionalists. But the substrative message of P's
texts, in my ever so humble opinion is getting more and more desperate
and grim. The Earth or God or some Murphey's Law may save us yet, but
humanity, like paradise is lost.