He's got a little list

[Dave Monroe]

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/jokespuns.htm

On Monday, September 15, 2014, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>
wrote:
> Thanks! And see as well, e.g., ...
>
> http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/palsat.html
>
>
http://books.google.com/books/about/A_Hand_to_Turn_the_Time.html?id=um0h0arlUdoC
>
> On Monday, September 15, 2014, Monte Davis <montedavis49 at gmail.com> wrote:
>> You, the Terrances and others have long beaten the drum for Bakhtin's
Problems..., and its discussion of Menippean satire and the "carnival sense
of the world," as a fruitful frame for Pynchon.
>> I just came across the passage below in Howard Weinbrot's Menippean
Satire Reconsidered: From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (2005). The
book mentions TRP only in passing -- but somehow, by distilling Bakhtin's
characteristics of carnival into a list, this makes them scream "PYNCHON!"
even louder than the original text.
>>
>> How We Got Here: Frye, Bakhtin, and Beyond
>>
>> On 14 May 1975 Northrop Frye wrote that before he
characterized Menip­pean satire "there was not one in a thousand university
English teachers of Gulliver's Travels who knew what Menippean satire was:
now there must be two or three."" Frye's modest mask does not change the
reality. His Anatomy of Criticism in 1957 is among the seminal texts of
literary theory in the second half of the twentieth century. It appeared
during the height of the academic formalist enterprise and offered a
powerful alternative of powerful generalization by a powerful mind. It also
offered adaptable categories by a learned reader who wrote with clarity and
dignity. His theory of genres includes satire, within which is the species
he begins by calling Menippean satire and concludes by calling the more
descriptive "anatomy." That genre is intellectual rather than novelistic,
uses "violent dislocations" of conventional narrative, and is manifest
in works by the usual classical authors and many others as diverse as
Walton's Compleat Angler and Voltaire's Candide, Burton's Anatomy of
Melancholy and Huxley's Brave New World, among numerous others.
>>
>> Frye's great virtues include an accessible alerting of literary students
to then unfamiliar Menippean modes. Others have considered the further
strengths and weaknesses of Frye's work. Robert C. Elliott praises his
brilliantdiscussion of Menippean texts, and Alastair Fowler laments that
"so many forms are united in the `anatomy' that it threatens to prove a
baggier monster than the novel." By some fifteen years after
Frye's Anatomy, however, critical theory had turned away from its North
American exemplars and toward France, Germany, and Russia, which supplied
the more exotic, dense, and labored theorists congenial to mod­ern
students. Frye's discussion was thus soon eclipsed by translations of
Mikhail Bakhtin's Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics in 1973 and especially
again in 1984. Bakhtin became the prime theorist both of the novel and, as
a powerful bye-blow, of what he calls the "menippea" and its ample
amplitude in a seriocomic form."
>>
>> The Menippea also is a vehicle for "the atmosphere of joyful
relativity charac­teristic of a carnival sense of the
world"(Problems, p.107; and pp. 124, 125). This Menippean carnival air
carries fourteen "basic characteristics" (p.114). Briefly, these are: (1)
an increased comic element; (2) liberation from history and legend so that
it is unfettered by "demands from an external verisimilitude to life" and
includes "an extraordinary freedom of plot and pbilosophical invention" (p.
114); (3) bold unrestraint in its "use of the fantastic" and its "testing
of a philosophical idea" (p. 114); (4) joining of the fantastic and
symbolic with "crude slum natural­ism" (p. 115); (5) contemplation of "the
world on the broadest possible scale" and consideration of "ultimate
questions" (p. 115); (6) plot structure that takes us "from earth to
Olympus and to the nether world" and thus engenders dialogues of the dead;
(7) "Experimental fantasticality" that takes one on high and changes "the
scale of the observed phenomena of life" (p. 116); (8) "moral-psychological
experimentation: a representation of the unusual, abnormal, moral and
psychic states of man" like madness; (9) scandal scenes and violation of
"the established norms of behavior and etiquette" that free us from
predetermined motives and norms; (10) sharp contrasts, for "the menippea
loves to play with abrupt transi­tions and shifts, ups and downs, rises and
falls, unexpected comings together of distant and disunited things,
mesalliances of all sorts" (p.118);  (11) "Social utopia" as in "dreams or
journeys to unknown lands" (p.118); (12); extensive use of other inserted
genres, like letters, prose, or poetry; (13) consequent "multi-styled and
multi-toned" works (p. 118); (14) "concern with current and topical issues"
that make it "the 'journalistic' genre of antiquity" (p. 118). "Such,"
Bakhtin says, "are the basic generic characteristics of the menippea. We
must again emphasize the organic unity of all these seemingly very
heterogenous features, the deep internal integrity of this genre" (p. 119).
>>
>> The shoe fits right down to the aiglets, man.
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