BtZ42 Read

[Jochen Stremmel]

Those who say Orwell hadn't the skills of a novelist should read Burmese
Days.

2016-03-16 14:50 GMT+01:00 ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>:

> Orwell, some say he hasn't the skill of a novelist, is here too. Not
> that the politics of the imagery is that obvious or flat, as in
> Orwell's _1984_, but the paranoia of a State that has an iron hand and
> squeezes the lead into the population as it crams them into a box car
> of death and suffocating emergency is there.
>
> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:46 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:
> > As in Mumford, who has the skills of a novelist, the imagery works as
> > it does in Adams, who also has the skills of a novelist, as history
> > and tone.
> >
> > On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:43 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >> As in Dickens the imagery is violent and dark and grim, and yet, like
> >> Dickens, a satirist who is more comic than corrective, Pynchon's grim
> >> humor (I guess we can't say Black Humor any longer) is essential, a
> >> rhetorical strategy that he will never relinquish though his critics
> >> find it either too hysterical and juvenile or too punny for its won
> >> good.
> >>
> >> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 9:39 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com>
> wrote:
> >>> Doesn't this opening remind anyone of the opening to Chapter Two of
> >>> _Against The Day_?
> >>>
> >>> The imagery in _AGTD_ may be a poaching parody, of Upton Sinclair and
> >>> others of the period, as McHale argues, and following that analysis we
> >>> should look for film parody and poach here, but here in this opening
> >>> of GR,  I am inclined to read this opening a not a parody or a poach,
> >>> but as the imagination of a writer who has been influenced, as
> >>> critical studies argue, by everyone and everything, but who has hit
> >>> his stride and is writing in a style that is rightfully and especially
> >>> his own. The anxiety of influence, so glaring in all previous works is
> >>> ground to dust. Though Mumford and Dickens and Orwell echo here, in
> >>> the imagery, Pynchon has a style all his own and what a style it is.
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 8:11 AM, Ray Easton
> >>> <raymond.lee.easton at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>> I loathe statements about literature of the form "it feels to me
> like..."  (
> >>>> pace, Mark -- not aiming at you, but only at myself! ), but I do have
> to say
> >>>> that some of what follows after the dream "feels to me like" the
> beginning
> >>>> of Ulysses.  Felt so my first reading and has every time since.
> >>>>
> >>>> I cannot figure out why, though -- and the why is what matters.
> >>>>
> >>>> Sent with AquaMail for Android
> >>>> http://www.aqua-mail.com
> >>>>
> >>>> On March 16, 2016 6:37:02 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> >>>>>
> >>>>> Distinct feeling of Mulligan at Ulysses opening now that you mention
> it.
> >>>>> Wholly changed but in comic tone and meaning
> >>>>>
> >>>>> On Wed, Mar 16, 2016 at 4:02 AM, Ian Livingston <
> igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> >>>>> wrote:
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> And the first rebirth is a Pirate, followed by Bloat.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> “There are proceedings of such a delicate nature that it is well to
> >>>>>> overwhelm them with coarseness and make them unrecognisable; there
> are
> >>>>>> actions of love and of extravagant magnanimity after which nothing
> can be
> >>>>>> wiser than to take a stick and thrash the witness soundly…“
> Nietzsche, BG&E,
> >>>>>> 29.
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>>
> >>>>>> And what is Pirate‘s relation to Buck Mulligan and Stephen Dedalus,
> >>>>>> anyway?
> >>>>>
> >>>>>
> >>>>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
>
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