He's got a little list

[Mark Kohut]

That shoe is organic leather.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 3:07 PM, Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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.
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l