GRGR (15): Good & Evil (was Enzian...)

[Terrance F. Flaherty]

Doug Millison wrote:

> 
> Clearly postmodern theory adds much to our appreciation of the novel and
> represents the fruit of much fine thinking and scholarship. [sniped]

These are very important points. Postmodern theory adds to
our appreciation, but like all theories it is limited by the
very fact that it is a theoretical approach, much as it is
often mistaken for a practical one, to literature. One can
approach literature written long before the term postmodern
enjoyed such "privilege" or indeed before the term was
coined by Toynbee, in fact critics have done so. I would
really love to see what McHale, for example, would say about
Melville's Confidence Man. How would McHale, for example,
deal with (in his terms) the "World Under Erasure" on April
Fool's Day, 1857? What would (again in his terms) his
"Mapping" make of the various con men or the single Protean,
Supernatural, even Satanic con man in various disguises? How
would his "Curcuits of Narrative Communication" deal with
narrators that are nearly the complete opposite of those in
GR in terms of character consciousness penetration, but
equally destabilizing, conning, bullying, betraying,
"parodistic of intelligibility"? How would his
"transgressions" account for Melville's subversive
digressions on the possibility of creating original
characters and on inconsistencies in characterization,
Harlequin, and Fiction?  Finally, how would his postmodern
theory explain, what he attributes to the "conditioned"
modern reader, this "postmodern" work of prose fiction? 

 (note, critics have attempted to classify Confidence Man as
every thing under the sun, though most agree it is a
mysterious equation with too many variables in plot,
character, and narrative voice to allow for a definitive
solution, and some suggest it has no plot, no characters and
not even narrators but stage directors)

I think McHale's work very valuable, but I disagree with his
basic formula and I find his tentative "narratives", chock
full of what I found so disturbing in Wood--- the "perhaps",
the "maybe", "it seems", "he suggests perhaps that maybe",
but this is perhaps a personal bias I can not seem to
decondition my modern brain away from, and while I'm
revealing my prejudices, I never trust critics that use too
many flowery metaphors or quote long passages to avoid
making their own arguments. The difficulty I have with
McHale is the conditioned reader. I don't buy this, though I
admit that McHale's arguments that follow his statement that
Pynchon holds the mirror up "to Reading" are excellent. That
being the case, however, many of the techniques McHale
attributes to "postmodernism," as he notes in correcting
himself in his second book, are only postmodern by virtue of
a postmodern theory or amplifications, extensions, pushings
of the envelope of modernism and I would add some
non-moderns as well. That Pynchon lures the reader into a
"dark alley" requiring that they find other paths out is
nothing postmodern and calling in one of the most
controversial and ambiguous statements in all of literature,
Keat's "Negative Capability" does not help his argument.
Statements like this one are disturbing, "one might well
wonder, along with the Pulitzer committee that rejected
Gravity's Rainbow, what to make of it all. Or perhaps the
question should not be so much what to make of it, as what
it makes of one." McHale equates Characters with Readers,
saying that "any character in this novel (GR) can be
analogically related to almost any other character" and that
"all the female characters have begun to merge in Slothrop's
mind, but more so in the reader's." And while he says, "My
use of the metaphor of paranoia and anti-paranoia for our
habits of reading and the damage which Gravity's Rainbow
does them may seem extravagant, but it is not wholly
unadvised," I think it wholly unadvised. In any event, I
think McHales second book a must read for anyone who wants
to understand what the hell critics are talking about half
of the time they are ostensibly discussing Pynchon.