Serious, Solemn, Satiric, Hopeless, Happiness

[O G]

If you're wondering from where such a line as no hope/so happy arose, it's
probably from a misunderstanding of Nietzsche.

Certainly of Zarathustra.  But even Nietzsche didn't understand
Zarathustra, so Miller is forgiven.


On Tue, Feb 27, 2024 at 5:31 AM Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> Sometimes when one has been away from ones computer and reading
> posts on one's phone, those posts seem be lost when one sits
> back down at the computer....caught in Icloud or somewhere.....
>
> So, I cannot find Dr, Krafft's post related to Miller's epigram but I hope
> I remember its
> thrust as an argument and major words. Serious, solemn and satirical.
>
> Although I could not articulate the paragraph Dr. Krafft wrote as well as
> he did, I think
> it expressed the way I read the story too. Tom IS satirizing these
> characters. One might say
> he is satirizing their seriousness, their solemnity?
>
> The first time I attempted to read *V,* still early in college but not in a
> class--that copy recently unearthed, the Modern Library edition
> with my bookmark still in it--I stopped at the party scene with the Whole
> Sick Crew in the bar with a pool table, etc. One used "a little too much
> force"
> as Dylan wrote, on what's her name.....I stopped reading because I thought
> I was
> to identify closely with The Whole Sick Crew. I came to understand
> otherwise, which the phrase 'sick crew' should
> have clued me in on earlier, I think.
>
> When I read* Entropy, *much later in time, I read the characters I think in
> the way Dr. Krafft has described.
> Describing the characters of that party as like the heat death of the
> universe, while we know entropy is
> overcome on this earth with every action we take, is to say these
> characters are dead--to human life; to human
> engagement; to human energy.
>
> To the plister who wrote one can't be happy with such expressed
> hopelesssness, I think Tom might have
> thought the same thing. That Miller's surprising paradox is not 'earned" as
> Dr. Leavis might say. Which is
> why Tom left it off the epigraph and is what the story is "about"....
>
> PS. I get Tom's later life criticism of 'starting with an idea first" but
> since I like ideas, esp Tom's, I still like
> this story for the way it works atmospherically, to pun ideationally.
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>