GRGR(3) talking dog 44.20

[rj]

> It's
> certainly a surreal enough novel to have a talking dog, but it's also a
> complex enough narrative in the novel to have a framed narrative (if you
> will) through Pointsman.  

I guess if you need to force the text to conform to naturalist or
Modernist narrative paradigms then this is one way to go. But I think
it's a given that both Pynchon and postmodernist critiques countenance
and indeed offer multiple readings of text, potentially limitlessly so.
In other words, the indeterminacy is deliberate. 

In this sequence point of view seems to shift back and forth, from
Pointsman, to the dog, to Roger, to Jessica, often within the space of a
sentence or even a phrase. Dog as "quarry" is Pointsman's perspective;
the "ought" of the second sentence is the dog's. U.s.w. Narrative
agency, detached and represented in the third person for the most part,
is filtered and fractured thus through the consciousnesses of the
players throughout the scene.

Pointsman, a good Pavlovian empiricist, "reads" the world in terms of a
singular, linear, cause and effect-type narrative; Mexico, a
statistician, as just a bunch of stuff that happens. Jessica endows
events with symbolic and metaphysical potentialities; while the dog
exemplifies instinct-driven response. All of these readings are
presented, commingled in the narrative. For the reader I guess it just
depends on where his or her empathies (and the sleeping dogs) lie.

In GR definitive semantic resolution is something like the reader's
"quarry" as well, and, as with Pointsman's dog, it is an endlessly
elusive proposition with lots of comical chicanery along the way. It is
telling, I think, that this scene ultimately jumpcuts to Pointsman's
meeting with Spectro and his smug and covetous co-ownership to "The
Book". 

What I also find interesting here is the splicing of genres/mediums;
effected in this sequence as elsewhere to upset reader expectations of
literary narrative. Talking dogs are nothing new. They've been a staple
of cartoons since the 1920s, I daresay. The reference to Lassie (is it
anachronism?) brings in the Hollywood filmic stereotype as well; and the
Russian names and the dog's cheesy accent seem to parody those trademark
Disneyfications of good and evil, a thread which recurs throughout the
novel. Pointsman and Mexico's caper strikes me as a pastiche of the
maniacal professor c/- leering sidekick archetype (think Bela Lugosi and
Peter Lorre, or, as later in GR, the creepy insane dude in Der Mabuse)
but in an Abbott and Costello or Keystone Cops scenario. Overlay
behaviourism vs statistics, romance, chase music, and underling/overlord
and damsel in distress paranoias and you've got quite a hotchpotch from
whence to venture forth on the process of creative interpretation.

best

ps I find that, more even than Blicero or Major Marvy, it is Katje
Borgesius who personifies craven and wilful amorality in this novel.