Pynchon mention, or: Is it really that funny?

[Markekohut]

To laugh is a " moral" attitude in living.  

Compared to some other writers, TRP seems to believe that humor matters in living through
our historic State of Siege time.


 

Sent from my iPad

On Mar 18, 2013, at 9:31 AM, "Monte Davis" <montedavis at verizon.net> wrote:

> I’m not sure what it means to say  that humor is (or isn’t) “decisive for Pynchon’s art,“ but I do still laugh out loud re-reading passages I first read 45 years ago. And I do not find that they detract from his moral seriousness. It is, after all, in a very funny dialogue between Zoyd and Hector that we encounter the central question of Vineland:
>  
>    “Hector! Bite yer tongue! You tellin’ me I ― I wasn't innocent, me behavin’ like a saint through it all?”
>    “You behaved about like everybody else, pardner, sorry.”
>    “That bad.”
>    “I won’t aks you to grow up, but just sometime, please, aks yourself, OK, ‘Who was saved?’ That’s all, rill easy, ‘Who was saved?’”
>    “Beg pardon?”
>    “One OD’d on the line at Tommy’s waitín for a burger, one got into some words in a parkín lot with the wrong gentleman, one took a tumble in a faraway land, so on, more ’n half of ’em currently on the run, and you so far around the bend you don’t even see it, that’s what became of your happy household, you’d’ve done better up against the SWAT team. Just in the privacy of your thotz, Zoyd. As a exercise, li’l kinda Zen meditation. ‘Who was saved?’”
>  
>  
> From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf Of Kai Frederik Lorentzen
> Sent: Monday, March 18, 2013 7:46 AM
> To: pynchon -l
> Subject: Pynchon mention, or: Is it really that funny?
>  
> 
> 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. 
>      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130318/e3ac7595/attachment.html>