The WreckIgnitions Read. Snarky question

[Mark Kohut]

And, since I probably was not clear, that superiority that generates sarcasm
is the narrator----Can't yet call him Gaddis hisself but a close relative, so to 
speak,
I'd think......

I am still surprised by the seemingly omniscient narrator....expecting
much more the limited omniscience of many novelists...like TRP, others of HIS 
time and since....from The Good Soldier 
even Hank James was not always so omniscient....

In a way, The Recognitions is narrated like an old-fashioned 19th Century novel
yet is not even close to the most famous beyond that....................



----- Original Message ----
From: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
To: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Sat, April 9, 2011 10:55:28 AM
Subject: Re: The WreckIgnitions Read. Snarky question

A--and, much more sarcasm in Gaddis?....good, bad, neither (just different)? 


Sarcasm in general---true here?---comes from what some might call more arrogance
than playfulness........narrator writes from a higher plane of superiority than 
V. ever
inhabits, yes?.....and even GR? Gaddis is more Swiftian in his savageness than
Pynchon----but Pynchon imagines over-the-top more like Swift. (What he sez 
surrealism
might have opened him to...conceits like a game of extreme metaphor) 

Which, again---choose C above---just says something about the overwhelmingness
on Gaddis vision herein, yes? Dark as a lie.....He KNOWS faking it is 
everywhere.......
For him the famous line might be: "The tower is nowhere"....? 

Pynchon on the page, although also a dramatically dark vision of History and 
America in V......and GR.......

laughs more? 


 


----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Ryan <himself at richardryan.com>
To: Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com>
Cc: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>; pov at ix.netcom.com
Sent: Sat, April 9, 2011 10:35:35 AM
Subject: Re: The WreckIgnitions Read. Snarky question

Concur.  Gaddis: dry, wry.  Pynchon: boisterous, sometime (to his
cost) buffoonish.

On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Gaddis, Pynchon, both 'comic' writers--as Erik Burns has helped me--us?--focus
> on.
>
>
> But Gaddis's wit, so laconic via the narrator, as They say of English wit is
> much
> more what we have come to label snarky than Pynchon's
>
> Which is, often simply juvenile and otherwise just Falstaff-exuberant on the
> page.
>
>
> Yes? Discuss among ourselves.....
>
>



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Richard Ryan
New York and the World
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