POVs, in and out of the text (was ...

[jbor]

I guess I sort of agree. But I think you can also hypothesise that Pynchon
does have a personal pov, and that sometimes, or always in fact, his own
perspective colours the way he represents the perspectives of his
characters, whether consciously or otherwise. And, conversely, by being
alert to the pov and prior attitudes which you bring into the text as a
reader I think it's quite possible to extract quite a bit more from the
works than a mere reflection of self.

The narratives do exhibit a great deal of empathy with a vast range of
different povs, and it seems to surprise and confound some readers when
characters such as Blicero and Pointsman aren't roundly condemned by the
text, quite the reverse at certain moments in fact. One way Pynchon achieves
this is by having the characters, rather than omniscient narration
(narrative agency is almost always filtered through a character's pov or a
narratological construct of some description in Pynchon's work), supplying
incidental, and sometimes conflicting, perceptions about other characters
and events. I think there's a case in point in _M&D_ in the way Dixon
extemporises about the Paxton Boys:

    " ... How as a Quaker born, can I feel toward them any Sentiments, but
    those of grievous Offense,-- yet how, as a Child of the 'Forty-Five, can
    my Heart fail to break, for the Lives they've been oblig'd to live? And
    such inquiries along that Line." (311.13)

It's not a denial of the violence and brutality which the Paxton mob
wrought, not by Dixon nor by Pynchon, but it is an attempt to understand why
the posse thought and acted as they did, to imaginatively enter into their
pov. It's in this respect that there's an open-mindedness and
non-judgementalism about Pynchon's work which stops just short of being
ambivalence, an accumulation of subjectivities which paradoxically creates a
type of detachment, if not in fact a true or "historical" objectivity.

I tend to think that Pynchon's conscious choice not to foist himself and his
own beliefs on the public at large - both by resisting the urge to give
interviews, do book tours and lectures, write op. ed. blather about current
affairs and so forth, and by deliberately obscuring as much as he can of a
"personal" or authorial pov in his fiction - is an indication of humility
and of a valuing of privacy rather than arrogance or megalomania, however.

best



on 29/7/02 3:10 PM, Dr. Concrescence at dr_omolu at yahoo.com wrote:

> I personally belive P's 'faith' is in his ability to
> completely and utterly enter into a POV, and become
> that POV- Which means a plunge into the nefarious
> Christian beliefs of many of his character, whether
> they be animate/inanimate or the grey automaton...
> Finding Christian Themes in Pynchon's Text is no more
> or less difficult than finding Buddhist- Hindu- or
> ancestor worshiping thematic structures- rather it
> reveals the bias of the reader or critic... I defy
> anyone to point to anything in a Pynchon text which
> does not come from a Point of View, which on
> consideration is 'Not That of The Authors' Pynchon
> Text is so embedded in an experiential gestalt of
> shifting modes of consciousness that one is hard put
> to 'rely' on the author to clue one in to the goings
> on... He deftly moves in and out of POV- That really
> ultimately one is forced to consider one's own
> experience as the guiding light- Not the author's...
> 
> Which causes the most remarkable
> phenomenom:Extra-textual encounters- Where for a
> moment it seems that Pynchon is scripting 'outside the
> book'... When I first read GR- There is a remarkable
> scene where the POV (sorry I don't want to check the
> text) suddenly is of someone passing over the
> bay-bridge and for a moment think they are on the
> Brooklyn Bridge... I set the book down and walked over
> the streets of San Francisco- To a friends house- The
> first thing he said to me? " I had the strangest
> experience today... For a moment while driving over
> the Bay Bridge I thought it was the Brooklyn
> Bridge..." And I was of course floored and amused...
> So Yes- We can all Parade our Bias- P is a gnostic
> X-ian, or the 'Relationship between Modern UFO cults
> and Pynchons view of methamphetamine psychosis in the
> pizza cults of the Upanishdad- with a discursion into
> Elvis's roots in Mesopatamia' But ultimately It
> describes our personal Bias-In other words it is safer
> to run a Freudian analysis on 'Why Pig Bodine loves
> Big Guns and Machines' then On 'Why Pynchon loves the
> Navy' We are never allowed to get that close to TP...
> 
> Dr. Con