MDMD(2): Deflation and Friendship flip-flop

[Monte Davis]

Good 'un. And Eric's, too, although I began to twitch at "the nature of the
self, the Other, relationship, intersubjectivity, etc..."

Why the twitch? I don't want to start another pomo-decon-Ancient Readers vs
Modern Readers war... but I care passionately about this "epistemology" of
fiction: how authors maneuver us into and out of not only characters' and
narrators' consciousness, but their systems of belief, trust and
plausibility. And so I plunged eagerly into many, many articles and books
that promised to tell me more about "unreliable narrators."

And found, all too often, second-rate philosophy instead of insight into
the fictions, which were treated as springboards to Deep Thought With Its
Very Own Hegelian Hermeneutic. I concluded, regretfully, that
deconstruction had poisoned the well. (And fell back on Wayne Booth and
Kenneth Burke, who haven't let me down yet.)

>>Pynchon, by cloaking his perceptions in these doubly indirect reports,
shows an incredible mastery of the art of story-telling. Oh and he also
nails that ridiculous line about 2-dimensional characters. Nothing 2-d
about the overlapping mental topographies we peruse in this scene.<<

Ex Actly. Story-telling. I'll do my own metaphysics, thank you very much; a
critic does quite enough to help me understand, at a nuts-and-bolts
technical level, how an author puts me through the hoops, over the jumps,
down the chutes and up the ladders. How he uses time and memory (the
characters', the narrator's, mine) to
build that more-than-three-dimensional topography -- and preserves all its
angles of vision, transparencies and obscurities while mapping it,
collapsing it, to a linear sequence of words, paragraphs, and scenes.     

Because that's the Old Magic, refreshed by astonishing technical progress
in the last century. To know all at the same time what Maisie knew, and
what she didn't know, and what she will know when she grows up. To know how
little Leopold and Stephen know of what they have in common -- and know
that it's more than enough. To know the numinous in, with, *through* that
gloomy prig Mason, that jumped-up bumpkin Dixon -- and kindly, trustworthy
Reverend Cherrycoke.

Proust, Musil, Broch, Faulkner, Nabokov... in my time and country, Pynchon
and
Hortense Calisher and Joseph McElroy are the first to mind as extenders of
the story-telling tool kit. I can't believe how much they get on the page.

-Marlowe <hmm, my cigar seems to have gone out>