a euphemism for P's poorest prose: warm excrement flowing from a pathetic puppet's mouth

[alice wellintown]

Sorry about that; I always read Paul Nightingale's wonderful posts.
So, around pp. 995-1003.
On page 1000, Vibe gives his address.

I call P lazy here because he simply doesn't work hard enough to pull
off the satire.

THhe MS uses mouthpieces, cranks, professional maniacs, like Hector,
Pointsman, Brock, Pudding, Stencil, all the men Oedipa meets...etc.
But here, Vibe slides into a comic book character; he looks and reads
like a drawn figure in Howard Zinn's comic book about America. Rvery
word that comes from his mouth is put there by a agent who supports
everything he seeks to belittle. It doesn't work because this is not
the Simpsons, it's a Thomas Pynchon novel.


The following description of Menippean satire is derived from M.M.
Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevski's Poetics, trans. Caryl Emerson
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), pp. 112-21.

Menippean satire derives from the philosopher Menippus (3rd century
B.C.), but it was identified as a specific genre by the Roman satirist
Varro, an older contemporary of Horace whose works exist only in
fragmentary form. Its fullest examples are the works of Lucian, who
sometimes uses Menippus as a character. "Menippean satire became one
of the main carriers and channels for the carnival sense of the world,
and remains so to the present day" (113). Bakhtin lists the following
characteristics.


1 It is usually more comic than Socratic dialogue.

2 It is unusually free (from history, realism, and legend) and hence fantastic.

3 Its fantasies create extraordinary situations for the purpose of
testing philosophical truth, especially through the manipulation of
perspective.

4 It mixes the fantastic, symbolic, and even quasi-religious with a
"crude slum naturalism."

5 It is "a genre of 'ultimate questions,'" combining bold invention
with broad philosophical reflection.

6 It uses the spheres of heaven, earth, and hell to look at these
ultimate questions.

7 It uses "experimental fantasticality," that is, "observation from
some unusual point of view" (116).

8 It often represents unusual states of insanity, split personality,
dreams, excessive passion, creating a "dialogic relationship to one's
own self."

9 Scandal, eccentricities, inappropriate speech, violations of
politeness and social expectations are very characteristic.

10 It is full of contradictory behavior and characters.

11 It combines elements of social utopia with other satiric elements.

12 It inserts a variety of other genres, often to parody them.

13 Hence it is "multi-styled" and "multi-toned."

14 It is concerned with current topics. "The satires of Lucian, taken
as a group, are an entire encyclopedia of his times" (118).


These diverse characteristics are united to produce "the deep internal
integrity of the genre," but at the same time, Menippean satire
"possesses great external plasticity and a remarkable capacity to
absorb into itself kindred small genres, and to penetrate as a
component element into other large ones" (119)-including diatribe,
soliloquy, symposium, and romance. Menippean satire, in short, is
philosophical fantasy working through extreme manipulation of
point-of-view and extremes of satiric material.



> Which section was that?
>
>>
>> Re-reading this section I am struck by the lazy prose P slides into
>> here as the ladies depart and with them the need for euphemism, which
>> is quickly replaced by the needless use og blasphemism when Sarsdale
>> launches into his sermon, a stilted screed, a crappy ranting parody
>> that might have been written by Howard Zinn for his cartoon version of
>> American History we see an evil plutocrat blow out verbal balloons, no
>> onomatopoeia or x#ck UZE, but we sense that P is too lazy to write a
>> decent parody, say,  of Letters from an American Farmer by J. Hector
>> St. John Crevecoeur or of Emerson, or, were he giving it the old
>> college try, Whitman, so we get this absurd little speech that no
>> character, not even Scarsdale, not even Brock Vond, would ever make;
>> it's all double think Orwellian political puppet teetering.
>
>