Laughter is sacred (BE340)

[Martha Rooster-Singh]

Yeah, it seems that the missing piece, at least the search for it, and the
laughter and the tears that are part of the search or quest, are truly
sacred.

 She does laugh. Doesn't she? While droll and wry, and because the author
has elected to use her narrative for most of the book, her sense of humor
is very close to the implied author's and, though his humor has been
much ridiculed recently in reviews, the author's humor, especially when he
combines bafoonery with grave themes (basic comic relief), crude, vulgar,
 and off-color humor, his silly songs and such, with desriptions of
historical evil and shades of conspiracy is essential to his method, to, to
use an old formalistic idea, his selection of genre.

Searching for a missing piece is one thing, finding it and making a
frictionless roll through life quite another.

from a review of Shell Siverstein's famous children's book

This very simple story deals with the concept of true happiness,
fulfillment, non-monogamy and love.  As Anne Roiphie explained in *The New
York Times* Book Review: *"This fable can also be interpreted to mean that
no one should try to find all the answers, no one should hope to fill all
the holes in themselves, achieve total transcendental harmony or psychic
order because a person without a search, loose ends, internal conflicts and
external goals becomes too smooth to enjoy or know what's going on. Too
much satisfaction blocks exchange with the outside."*
Yes, exchange with the outside is there in Entropy. Opedipa is the missing
piece and quester in the excluded middle polis. So rich and poor NYC.


Sophocles implies that incest and exile, too much unity and
too much diversity, are not opposites but are, literally,
two sides of the same coin. He also suggests, what the
audience believed, that incest and parricide are acts that
obliterate the distinction between man and beast, inside and
outside, the wild and civilization. What *Oedipus* lacks (and
Thebes as well) is some *middle* term, an Aristotelian Polis
that mediates between our divinity and animality, making us
whole in a community constituted by diversity.” 287
So says,  J. Peter Euben in  The Road Home: Pynchon’s The
Crying of Lot 49, the concluding chapter of his The Tragedy
of Political Theory. [1990]

“If there is any hope in the novel, it rests with Oedipa.
She is the only one who does not give up the quest…she is
the *middle* term….” 302

Is Oedipa the *middle* term, an Aristotelian polis?

‘tis better to be lord of men than of WASTE: since neither
walled town nor ship is anything, if it is void and no men
dwell with thee therein.”  Priest of Zeus to *Oedipus*


Greek Drama, Pynchon knows, has its roots in cult and in drama, gief and
laughter are seperated, so comedy and tragedy. The comic mingling was part
of the felmale cult. In BE, as in AGTD, P explores these themes of sex,
gender, cult and the sacred. Horst meets Maxine in a bar, the Ceres in
Chicago.  Sure, he trades grains, the bar is actually there, but what has
happened to the cult of Ceres?



O'Higgins locates the source of this tradition in women's cultic obscenity,
*aischrologia*. The first chapter reviews the evidence for women exchanging
lewd jests and ritual insults in the context of the festivals of Demeter,
especially in Attica. The literary evidence for this is late, most notably
the scholiasts of Lucian and Athenaeus, but O'Higgins makes good use of
material evidence to bolster her case. She argues that the Thesmophoria
provided a forum where women could exchange information, via cultic mockery
and sexual jesting, about using certain plants and herbs to control their
fertility. Thus women's speech is not simply a reaction to a male hegemony
but the product of a subculture which assisted women in gaining control of
their own bodies.

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2004/2004-12-22.html



On Wed, Jan 15, 2014 at 11:17 PM, David Payne <dpayne1912 at hotmail.com>wrote:

> Because he's a missing piece of Maxine who doesn't laugh?
>
> On Mon, 6 Jan 2014 09:12:36 -0500, martharoostersingh at gmail.com wrote:
>
> Why does P give this profopund insight to Horst?
>
>
> If BE is what has been called a satire, not in the mode of GR (GR may be
> considered, and has been by several critcs, and with success, a Menippean
> Satire, an Anatomy, a Encyclopedic Narrative, Postmodern non-corrective
> Satire), but what is called "light-hearted satire", we should do well to
> give our attention to Horst's claim that laughter is sacred. Laughter, of
> course, is not essenatial to satire, and, is not its goal. In fact, as
> Horst explains, so much that is called humor is a sacralization of the
> profane consumer laugh track or  the mere use of satirical tools of irony,
> parody, and the like.
>
> BE is not meant to be a funny book. I may make us laugh, or smile, but
> rarely LOL, because it is light-hearted satire that seeks to humor us out
> of our collective paranoia and call attention to what we have
> made sacred----9-11, that Survivor Tree, the Flag, the Wars.
>
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