Sounds of Silence; was Re: VLVL(6)... and 'Slothrop'

[rj]

A coupla really worthwhile posts from last week---neglected in deference
to such eminently more important and entertaining cybergameshows as
'What's My e-Line', presented as ever by our charming and bountiful
compere, Gennaro the Rarely Indisposed---merit closer attention. Dan's
post about narrative shifts and authorial presence was triffic. This
snippet in particular took my fancy: 

> 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.

And Pynchon just such a budding von Goll perhaps? But, there's more to
this, too. For, in their imposition of an artificial order, cinema and
the novel both are merely secondary reflections of 'The System', and
thus serve also as its bulwarks. In dispensing with the conventions of
'the novel' in the final section of _GR_, Pynchon, having previously
revealed himself as this "'Wizard'", renounces his Director's Chair
unequivocally in a genuinely revolutionary gesture. In the deliberate
culmination of plot and character as aleatory phenomena (i.e. the Tarot
readings), whether affectation or no, Pynchon effectively dismantles
both mediums and resists the neat closure of the traditional literary
narrative.  

The film on the screen, like the 'theme' of a novel or the 'justice' of
a political regime or the 'faith' in a creed---like all systemisations
of human society and travail---deludes its faithful audience into
believing that there "is a Hand to turn the time", "a Soul in ev'ry
stone"; and so we sit and take our comfort (physical and spiritual) from
this sense that Reason and Purpose do prevail and believe it will be so.
Of course, the bomb drops. And that's that. An apocalyptic silent space
ensues, one in which the world of the text (as of its readers) seems to
expire. Ironic, huh?

It's silences (and this ultimate silence) which Pynchon is drawn to
again and again in _GR_: "the great silences of the Seven
Rivers"(340-1); the "Kirghiz Light"(358); Sir John Franklin and Salomon
Andree's "announcements of... victory", their deaths in the "polar
silence..."(589); Felipe's rock (612-3). As Enzian perceives the rocket
as "holy text"(520) he suddenly realises he has been hoodwinked: "the
real Text persisted, somewhere else, in its darkness, our darkness . . .
(520) The tension in Pynchon's fiction, its appeal, derives from just
this contest: the recognition that Text, the act of naming, even a
single utterance, inevitably and inextricably carries with it, is
inscribed as, a corrupted and corrupting power dynamic (engendering a
Will to Silence, nihilism), and the diametrically opposed and seeming
gut reflex faith in and hope of the potentiality for change, for the
possibilities, for the subjunctive 'Good' (inspiring the Will to Write,
art).

brian's question about Slothrop's dis-assembly in the narrative, and
psmale's hypothesis about Slothrop's fragmentation as being like the
working out of some mathematical function are part and parcel of this
refusal to conform to the conventions of narrative exegesis, this
baulking at 'system' of any kind. Slothrop scuffles off into 'real'
world anonymity, away from 'the stage' of the novel. It's like the film
running backward, another reversal of cause and effect, defiance of
logical sequence. It's an anti-mathematical function: Slothrop becomes
'us'.

rj (perennially languishing in fuzzy mediocrity)