RE>RE- Will's students, Bre

[ChrisO at fieldschool.com]

Date	5/16/96
Subject	RE>RE- Will's students, Bre
>From	ChrisO
To	pynchon list

                      RE>RE: Will's students, Brennan              5/16/96
          
          >Paul Mackin wrote about Paul Auster's "Smoke":
          The film is also about storytelling in
          >general and seems to say that everyone has a story to tell and many of
          them are
          >interesting and valid in their own right.
          
          To add - 
             the question of whose story is worth narrating is also raised in
          both the IJ tirade (pp. 834-5) about the "figurants" (Stork's word) in
          the Cheers bar - those extras at the tables who must always mime
          talking to each other normally while Sam and Diane try to get into each
          other's pants - and in the Don Delillo story "Videotape" as published
          in Harper's December 1994. In the first, DFW's Gately posits that if
          one of the peripheral characters ever stood and started waving and
          hollering to get the full camera there would doubtless be much comedy
          as Sam and Diane calmed him down, assumed he was choking on a beernut,
          etc. Focus is always pulled to the stars; the edge can never get the
          center. "Videotape" discusses a child's accidental videotaping of a
          murder while playing with the camera and comments on how much happens
          around the edges of our focus - the fact that we see minutes before the
          murder, not just the newsclip, etc. That the middle of the screen is
          not always where the action is, is the thing.
               The striking similarity to Kathleen's comments on "Leviathan" lies
          not just in the author's proclamation of multiple stories, but in his
          refusal to commit to one perspective as superior, or even trustworthy.
          Somewhere this relates to the postmodern shibboleth about a subjective
          reading being the ONLY reading that can be trusted and all experience
          being equally valued, or de-valued (which, by the by, could explain all
          those annoying invented pomo words like "mis/aproppriate(d)" - "I
          invent my own language as well, thank you...") 
                Me, I'm mostly reminded of Sondheim's "Into the Woods," which I
          saw on cable a few nights ago, and the marvelous moment in which the
          characters grab the narrator and feed him to the giant without
          considering how uncertain and disturbing everything would be
          thereafter. When your author refuses to declare a winner and tell you
          which way to go/who to believe/the way out of the woods, things turn
          dire. But also exciting and growth-inducing, as the 2nd act of the play
          shows, but not purely happy. Oh no.
                I'm done now.
          
          Chris O.