Pynchon mention, or: Is it really that funny?

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

http://goingdutchwithgermanwriters.wordpress.com/

"He reads very little, he said. But he seems to go to libraries and get 
fixations with things -- Thomas Pynchon made him laugh out loud and get 
chucked out of the library the other day, apparently."

There are funny things in Pynchon - the rocket limericks, or the 
dialogues of Zoyd and Hector -, but I doubt the whole story and I'm not 
sure that humor is decisive for Pynchon's art. It's not that I don't 
like humor in literature, I just think it's not Pynchon's domain, and 
the image of Pynchon as a funny writer has become a cliché by now. At 
least over here. And while it's true that it is very hard to tell - and 
the longer you read the harder it becomes - what Pynchon is actually 
saying, his work is definitely not a joke. Carl Schmitt says that all 
valid political theories - like the ones of Hobbes and Machiavelli - do 
consider the human being to be evil. As a catholic social theorists 
Schmitt traces this tradition back to original sin. For Pynchon, too, 
original sin - or "inherent vice" - is what makes people do what they 
do. This is not saying that Pynchon does not point out socio-historical 
factors like slavery, Prussian militarism, or industrialization which 
certainly do contribute to the whole mess. But there's always - the 
cases of Frenesi and Lake make this clear - something about the 
characters' failure which cannot be explained in rational terms. This is 
what I call Pynchon's catholic seriousness. It's what makes his 
literature true. Far more important than the dope jokes and the 
scatology. Feel free to disagree.

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