Pynchon mention, or: Is it really that funny?

[Prashant Kumar]

Every time I've read something which declares Pynchon "funny" without much
further qualification, I get the sense that the writer is grasping for
something to say. To call him funny, and just funny, seems to me a bit of a
cop out.

P.

On Tuesday, March 19, 2013, Markekohut wrote:

> 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-hi
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://waste.org/pipermail/pynchon-l/attachments/20130319/46813d34/attachment.html>