Ian McEwan, friend of TRP

[Ian Livingston]

I think Mark Knopfler struck the chord pretty well with Private
Investigation. All intelligent life is a detective story, in which the
detective self seeks clues to the murder of innocence. It's one of those
ancient traditions. Oedipus was a detective, as were Isis and Horus. Is
there a more ancient tradition in literature?


On Sun, Jun 3, 2012 at 11:36 AM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:

> I,too, think Paul nailed it square BUT
> elaborating on this riff after my recent Shakey (re)reading,
> I, too, was taken with all of the 'spying' in some plays, such as hamlet,
> although not official spying...
> one that I registered this time from
> another play we know TRP seemed to like---from the
> allusion of that early story---Measure for Measure, this
> time I really noticed the Duke who went undercover to
> spy on his people.....back when I musta assumed it
> was the normal divine right of a duke........................
>
>
>
>   *From:* alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> *To:* pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> *Sent:* Sunday, June 3, 2012 2:22 PM
>
> *Subject:* Re: Ian McEwan, friend of TRP
>
> Itz hyperbole. If we want to be exact about it we can't call
> Dostoyevsky or Poe Spy Novelists. We can't even call Poe a novelist;
> he only wrote one longish work of fiction, he said the novel was not a
> fit form for the man of genius or for a reader. If we loosen up the
> definition we may as well include Shakespeare. Sure, Hamlet is a spy
> novel. Why G&R are spies. And Polonius sicks spies on his son, and the
> everyone in the play i spying on someone. A parody of the popular
> revenge tragedy, Hamlet may be called a spy novel-tragedy. Ay, and
> isn't the Odyssey a spy novel-epic? Sure it is. Why the Gods and the
> mortals are all a bunch of spies.
>
> Of course, I think Paul M is closer to the mark because the spy novel,
> while it may be related to the quest and journey of epic and tragedy,
> and to the revenge plots of tragedy, and to the detective fiction of
> Dickens, the Rusiinas, Poe & Co., seems to be post-romantic modernism,
> so the fragments of chivelary are only draped over the machine guns
> and massive machines of mass urban murder or war as we experience it.
>
>
>


-- 
"Less than any man have I  excuse for prejudice; and I feel for all creeds
the warm sympathy of one who has come to learn that even the trust in
reason is a precarious faith, and that we are all fragments of darkness
groping for the sun. I know no more about the ultimates than the simplest
urchin in the streets." -- Will Durant
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