Even Cathy Berberian knows...she can't sing

[Ian Livingston]

I still resist and deplore use of the terms, modern and post-modern as
literary descriptors. Modern just means contemporary, as everything
has always been in its time, and post-modern, then, must apply to what
has not yet happened. The academic application of these terms to
periods in cultural trends is just absurd, unimaginative arrogance.

If we read Pynchon with conservative expectations, we miss good shit,
that's all. People read according to the stage of their psychological
and educational development. People write according to the same
developmental potentials. Where the reader cannot apprehend the
written material, there lies no fault, only differences of
psychological and intellectual capability. If you've only reached the
third floor, you just don't know what happens on the fourth. Of
course, that does not mean gibberish is the work of highly developed
thinkers, but Plato's works seem like gibberish to the naive.

Potsmodernism, my rump vapor!

As to the content of your post outside the use of those useless terms,
there is some meat in there with them post-taters.

On Fri, Sep 10, 2010 at 4:53 AM, Dave Williams <daveuwilliams at yahoo.com> wrote:
> In the Introduction to J. Kerry Grant's _Companion To V._ he discusses the "remarkably conservative expectations" most readers bring with them.  He explains the Scylla and Charybdis readers must navigate, between (in GR terms) Stencil's paranoia and Benny's anti-paranoia.
>
> Why do readers bring such "conservative expectations" to a text like V.?
>
> What is it that causes readers to read (McHale's terms) postmodernist texts with modernist expectations?
>
> I'm sure any student of crtical theory and/or literary criticism can explain this. Provided he/she reads French ;-).
>
> But us ordinary folk, us readers of Melville's _Confidence Man_ should a been dare dunndat awlready, nah?
>
> "Historians undertake to arrange sequences,---called
> stories, or histories---assuming in silence a relation
> between cause and effect...American female...was a goddess
> because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was
> production---the greatest and most mysterious of all
> energies; all she needed was to be fecund."
>                        The Education of Henry Adams, An Autobiography
>
>
> Historical considerations in v. are based on an exploration
> of the mystery of causation and the meaningfulness in the
> contiguity of events.
>
>
> Modern Fiction Studies 45.3 (1999) 600-620 "More Advanced
> the Deeper We Dig": Ratner's Star by David Cowart
>
> Eliot, T. S. "The Hollow Men." Collected Poems 1909-1962.
> London: Faber, 1963. 87-92.
>
> Johnson, Samuel. Rasselas, Poems, and Selected Prose. Ed.
> Bertrand H. Branson. New York: Holt, 1958.
>
> Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels. 1726. Ed. Herbert
> Davis. Oxford: Blackwell, 1962.
>
> Voltaire. Candide. 1759. Trans. Lowel Bair. New York:
> Bantam, 1959.
>
> History in V. is also defined through the symbol of the hothouse,
> temporal homesickness, the role of mirror time and clocks,
> clothing, attention paid to the role of political events,
> the different attitudes toward words that affect world views
> and actions, the presence of magical causation, the
> relationship between Myth and Deity and their possible
> organizing agency, the existence of conspiracy, and the effects of
> randomness.
>
>
> In V. "The Situation" is basically a social phenomena in a
> world in which normal causality is replaced by chance and symbolic
> identification of V. and other characters within a
> "non-chronological narrative."
>
> The "narrative" includes first person narration by Stencil, who when not
> impersonating someone else, refers to himself in the third
> person.
>
> The associations perceived by the characters are
> invested with meaningfulness not appropriate to their
> relations and these associations are the agents that spur character
> behavior. The process of recognizing the meaningfulness of
> associations is complicated by the problems that the characters have in interpreting events.
>
> The statements that the characters make about how the world
> is ("the case") reflect their  ethical views and the machinations of their imaginations.
>
> Annihilation.
>
> How do characters deal with loss of the Virgin, the gods,
> the myths of culture and the cultural presence of human annihilation?
>
> Can it be glossed over by gaudy surfaces? By painting it white?
> By Vheissu? Can the color white counter the gaudiness of
> decadent history?
>
> The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket & Moby-Dick.
>
> What is under/behind the "pasteboard mask"? Being & Time or Nothing?
>
> What Irony functions here?
>
> White is associated with death and surface.
>
> Disguise is also a surface that covers, preventing
> the discovery of what lies beneath;
>
> The Tourist avoids meaning by eschewing commitment (will You be a tourist at Dora?).
>
> The disguise and the tourist mentality are both means of avoiding knowledge.
>
> We see here in the early chapters that it is Benny Profane, that
> self-proclaimed schlemiel, who provides one of the glosses
> in the book concerning the disturbing qualities of the
> inanimate and human love for an object.
>
> The Gun!
>
> In V.,  inanimate objects are invested with human
> characteristics. Humans are subtly inanimated. This process
> involves the usurptation of cultural power for the
> deification of the Dynamos and their Angels of Death. By
> dispossessing Man of gods (virgin),  history/nightmare
> divests humans of human characteristics through reification
> (note how Characters use Personification).
>
> Once humans have been divested of their human characteristics through
> reifications they are then re-invested with pseudo-human
> characteristics--the Human becomes an object or fetish.
>
>
> Humans become artificial objects masquerading as humans, a
> poor substitute for humanity. But they are perfectly
> adapted, acceptable as citizens of history/nightmare of
> decadence (in Fausto's terms, "moving toward non-humanity."
>
> Irony and satire are the game for the young Thomas Pynchon here, his
> targets are the dull and single-mindedly analytical. This use
> of satire places Pynchon within a tradition of literature
> which attributes inanimate or non-human qualities to those
> satirized.
>
> Ones that come to mind are Gulliver's Travels, Hard Times, Heart of Darkness and The Waste Land.
>
> Here in these opening chapters we can see that this Irony and Satire involves the expression by characters of a  peculiar love
> for objects. But it also works with impersonation and the
> carnival use of disguise, voyeurism and the use of mirrors,
> decadence and disease, tourism and the "Street", and
> seemingly sentient automata.
>
>
> See Rainer Maria Rilke's Requiem Fur Eine Freundid and the
> Robert Hass Introduction to The Selected Poetry of RM Rilke.
>
> "The key to the idea is the mirroring...I don't think Rilke
> ever made a plainer  statement of what he wanted art to be:  cessation of desire; a place where our inner emptiness stops generating that need
> for things which mutilates the world and turns it into badly
> handled objects..."
>
>
> Profane thinks that inanimate objects are hostile and
> threaten his survival. By ascribing human characteristics to inanimate objects, Profane is at times uncertain what is or is not animate.
>
> Benny pisses on the cosmic center of the universe because he can't deal with the human.
>
> He identifies with the cosmic agency here and his  impersonation  of the Angel of Death is the parodic manifestation, "Mezuzah" is a New Testament pun here, "prophylactic" and "phylactery" and is an example of how sexual desires have co-opted spiritual aspirations.
>
> Profane is mock Prometheus, Job, god, "suppose I was god…if I was god…Zap…" and in this example Moses and the authors of J/C history. He sums it up thus, the impetus of human history is the desire for sexual satisfaction.
>
>
> THE BLUE ANGEL
>
> Marlene Dietrich is singing a lament for mechanical love. She leans against a mortarboard tree on a plateau by the seashore.
>
> She’s a life-sized toy, the doll of eternity; her hair is shaped like an abstract hat made out of white steel.
>
> Her face is powdered, whitewashed and immobile like a [...]
>
> --Ginsberg
>
>
>
>
>



-- 
"liber enim librum aperit."