M & D Group Read "Make 'Em Laugh"...

[alice malice]

Back when Melville was writing there was much debate about the use of
humor and Melville, and Hawthorne, believe it or not, were on the side
that argued for laughter over wit, comedy over satire. How could
America have satire when, unlike the nations of Europe, it had few
institutions of fixed power and corruptions, and many evolving and
devloping norms? Of course, these were taking hold, as the Chapter on
Fast Fish in Moby-Dick, a critique of America's Imperial ambitions,
shows, but America was not yet the New Empire. This would take time,
and produce works like Catch 22 & Co., but also new generation of
writers who seem to return to Melville's Blackmess, and Hawthorn'es
for that matter, with an ironic Blackness of their own; though the
term "Black Humor" is somewhat tainted, so Fables of Subversion.

Fables of Subversion: Satire and the American Novel

by Steven C. Weisenburger

Drawing on more than thirty novels by nineteen writers, Fables of
Subversion is both a survey of mid-twentieth century American fiction
and a study of how these novels challenged the conventions of satire.
Steven Weisenburger focuses on the rise of a radically subversive mode
of satire from 1930 to 1980. This postmodern satire, says
Weisenburger, stands in crucial opposition to corrective, normative
satire, which has served a legitimizing function by generating,
through ridicule, a consensus on values. Weisenburger argues that
satire in this generative mode does not participate in the
oppositional, subversive work of much twentieth-century art.

Chapters focus on theories of satire, early subversions of satiric
conventions by Nathanael West, Flannery O'Connor, and John Hawkes, the
flowering of "Black Humor" fictions of the sixties, and the forms of
political and encyclopedic satire prominent throughout the period.
Many of the writers included here, such as Vladimir Nabokov, William
Gaddis, Kurt Vonnegut, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon, are
acknowledged masters of contemporary humor. Others, such as Mary
McCarthy, Chester Himes, James Purdy, Charles Wright, and Ishmael
Reed, have not previously been considered in this context.

Posing a seminal challenge to existing theories of satire, Fables of
Subversion explores the iconoclastic energies of the new satires as a
driving force in late modern and post-modern novel writing.

On Thu, Feb 26, 2015 at 8:17 AM, Johnny Marr <marrja at gmail.com> wrote:
> Not sure, I find the Paranoids section of TCOL49 very funny. I do appreciate
> your wider point, that TRP's intentionally writing in a more humorous
> fashion, but then he's always favoured the picaresque.
>
>
> On Thursday, February 26, 2015, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Becky writes: This novel has some very serious themes, but told with a
>> LOT of humor - not just humor to lighten the atmosphere -there's
>> actually a comic tone.
>>
>> So true..a friend of mine thinking of reading it for the first time,
>> dipped in...so hilarious, he said (and he knows some other Pynchons).
>>
>> Laughs, laughs everywhere. Maybe another part of the Tale-Telling
>> meaning: Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh, Make 'Em Laugh.
>> This tone may not be seen in any other work until INHERENT VICE?? he
>> says controversially.
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l