V2nd, C3

[alice wellintown]

One of the greatest challanges of teaching Adams is to convince
readers that he is very funny. It is, I'll admit, a great challange to
teach Modernism and point out the funny, but that's not because it
isn't there; it is because the wry, ironic, satire, the
self-deprecating genius, the loathing of the loss of certitude, the
nostalgia for it, sucks the air of all silly string and hands under
the arm pit squeezing a fart sound ...but it is there. Bitter and
sweet and sad and funny too. Adams is closer to Dr. Strangelove and
Scooby-Doo than you imagine.

We’ve talked a lot about how young P was begging, borrowing, and
stealing from Hawthorne, Irving, Melville, Poe (American Romance), and
from Hemingway, Eliot (TS), Fitzgerald, and Adams & Co. (American
Modernism & The Lost Generation). Now, one can not deny that young P
begs borrows, and steals from these authors. Anyone as familiar as we
are with the primary and secondary texts (of which there are thousands
and not hundreds now) can not fail to understand that young P is a
great thief.  But my argument is something else. Putting aside the
American Romance thesis for the moment and turning to the question
about Fitzgerald and the lost and sad generation, we want to consider
why young P was so attracted to these Lost Generation authors. In his
Slow Learner Intro, older P, reflecting  on his development as an
author, talks about his own “Lost Generation.” Yes, this is the idea;
that young P and his contemporaries were the lost generation Part II
and, as with the sad and lost of the first group, this second group’s
literary imagination was forged in war (cold war), and it is this cold
war and its appalling impact on Labor (see the Port Huron Statement of
SDS) that launches their revolt. In 1920-21, This Side of Paradise and
Three Soldiers were the prose narrative that claimed the torch that
had not quite been passed on to this new generation of Americans, for
the not-lost generation was still writing. But it was Hemingway’s man
and Fitzgerald’s jazz, the war and its aftermath, that came to define
a new generation—forged in war and modernism, they wrote of its climax
and collapse, of its great triumph and its disillusioned and brilliant
young men, its Beautiful and its Damned, and they, uneasy with the
American West from which they sprung, developed American Modernism
(these are writers we compare with Joyce, with Picasso, are moving
toward Joyce and the art of Europe and the bitter loss expressed in
and by a collapsed and destroyed humanism in Europe, not Pynchon, who
is not of their generation but of the generation of authors, like
Farina, who identified with this Lost Gen I, for a bunch of
reasons—again, see Slow Learner Intro., but were a new generation of
Americans—a Kennedy Generation if you will).

see Alfred Kazin _On Native Grounds, Edmund Wilson, _Literary Essays
and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s_ essay on Eliot is quite helpful.

On Sat, Jul 17, 2010 at 7:31 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> yeahp......we have to keep in our minds the fact that
> pynchon believes in laughing..often aloud..
>
> I have just read another section of Adams in which, reporting
> some sad events, he says ironically, sarcastically, using a French
> phrase seemingly current...........
>
> "So you find life amusing?"............
>
> P does. P believes it should be, it seems.
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>
> To: P-list <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sat, July 17, 2010 1:30:48 AM
> Subject: Re: V2nd, C3
>
> while I go along with a lot of this, I personally find Pynchon a lot
> more fun than Adams.
> Adams is more like Eeyore.
> Pynchon is like, well, somebody familiar enough with Eeyore's
> arguments and who likes him enough
> to jolly him out of it.
>
>
>
>
> --
> Yippy dippy dippy,
> Flippy zippy zippy,
> Smippy gdippy gdippy, too!
> - Thomas Pynchon ("'Zo Meatman's Gone AWOL")
>
>
>
>
>