Game Over for Art?

[Fiona Shnapple]

 But I had probably best attempt a little to glance in
each direction; since it comes to me again and again, over this
licentious record, that one's bag of adventures, conceived or
conceivable, has been only half-emptied by the mere telling of
one's story. It depends so on what one means by that equivocal
quantity. There is the story of one's hero, and then, thanks to
the intimate connexion of things, the story of one's story itself.
I blush to confess it, but if one's a dramatist one's a dramatist,
and the latter imbroglio is liable on occasion to strike me as
really the more objective of the two.

HENRY JAMES.
Preface, The Ambassadors

I don't want to argue that readers need to do anything, but the kind
of emotional involvement that rejects this work because of its
apparent flaws in judgement, even to racist or misogynist hangups of
an old embarassment, is unfair to the author, to the art, and, to
one's own reading of the work. I don't to blame the reader for her
need for a different kind of speed, or romance, or whatever, but this
is not a book to read for such qualities. Here, we have, like it or
not, an aesthetic and intellectual work that challanges the reader by
couching its pleasures in Sloth.

Though the book has laughs, these are few and frightening, sublime
even, or graoners and boners that playfully and paradoxically pun with
us so that, like comic relief in tragedy, we are released from the
building tension for a moment, only to have the tragic themes
hightened, inexhorably dragged to the Grave.

This novel is about Death. It's quite serious, grave serious. Because
P is talking about Game Over for Art.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l