VLVL(6) "conditionally become Frenesi"

[Dan O`Hara]

On Tue, 8 Dec 1998 MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu wrote:

> Doug equates the scene where Prairie desperately tries
> to identify with her mother through the cinematic screen with the
> condition of reader before the text seeking the author of the text.
> On what grounds can we draw the analogy?

These moments of longing, of cybernetic desire often crop up in Pynchon -
the camera in GR springs to mind. Steve Weisenburger demonstrated that, as
far as narrative function goes, the latter worked as a focaliser, shifting
the reader from one diegetic level to another - but then all kinds of
entities, not all of them machines, are used as focalisers.

When a machinic focaliser is used - a camera, a cinema screen -
two things happen. It facilitates the shift, from one (hierarchical)
narrative level to another; and (most unusually) it draws our attention to
the technique used - it makes us aware that some literary prestidigitation
is happening, some trickery. It forces upon us the awareness that behind
the curtain, the 'Wizard' is really just a little old man operating the
controls.

However reticent he is with the media, Pynchon the writer has an ego the
size of a rocket. So much of his narrative technique derives its novelty
from the way in which it draws attention to its own workings, and thereby
to the author and the reader/author relationship - these machinic
focalisers, Bernard Duyfhuizen's 'reader-traps' are all part of this
peculiar armoury.

Nor is Pynchon coy about what he's up to. Elsewhere (in the 'Luddite'
essay) he writes about 'The Castle of Otranto', with its phantasmic
apparitions, disembodied parts, emerging in mid-air as if direct from the
unconscious; in "Lot 49', in the shower scene, he mimics the idea; in GR,
the Wizard of Oz lurks behind the whole text. The reader's looking for the
author, all right - and Pynchon has an awful lot of fun playing
hide-and-seek.

Dan O'Hara