GRGR(3) talking dog 44.20

[rj]

>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.

then KW again:
>I'm not sure if I understand your objection.  The indeterminacy
>of the text is what I have been arguing for.  I don't see how
>mention/use of a framed narrative within the text (not my mention of it)
>would lock any text into a naturalist or a modernist mode, nor how it
>strictly falls under their paradigms.

I'll take David Morris's cue and assume that this is indeed a request
for clarification rather than a petty dismissal. Keith seemed to be
arguing the Pointsman-as-framing-narrator theory as an alternative,
rather than a complementary, reading to Doug's. Perhaps I was wrong?
Keith's subsequent post certainly seems to signal, if not this, then a
shift:

> it's not problematic to read the dog as thinking x, but bits of the
> language regarding his thought also appear to use a language to describe it
> that Pointsman would also use.  It seems to me that it could go either way,
> thus it's indeterminate. 

Yes, but what of the dog narrating and interspersing Pointsman's
language? As David points out, you don't allow equal credence to the
surreal possibilities in the narrative process. 

Neither naturalist nor Modernist paradigms of reading are pluralistic,
which is what the apprehension of a deliberately indeterminate text
implies. 

The naturalist model has an omniscient narrator who projects action,
event, and circumstance onto the narrative screen -- in retrospect, as
it were. Reader and author thus assume a detached and superior advantage
to those of the characters, and share a complete and singular reading of
narrative and themes by novel's close.

The Modernist model inserts the narrative into character or characters'
(stream of) consciousnesses apparently with little or no overt exterior
mediation. Again, reader and author ultimately assume a detached and
superior advantage to those of the characters, and are able to construct
a complete and singular reading of narrative and themes in the text by
virtue of a process of recombination.

In contrast, Pynchon's postmodern narratological mode could be called
cinematographic. The scene switches back and forth between a range of
characters' povs, both physiologically and intellectually. And, as with
film, it is the insistence of the present tense which places both the
'writer'/narrator and the reader *into* the text with the characters.
There is no detached vantage or superior perspective from which to
conclusively view, discriminate between versions, or condemn. The text
may predict what 'will happen' on an implicit basis of past experience:
the doctor "will" name the dog Vladimir or Ilya etc/(i.e. as he has in
the past); but no-one, including the reader, knows for sure, because of
the narrative's affectation of immediacy and multiplicity. 

Of course, the categories are not hard and fast in terms of the texts
themselves, for 'naturalist' and 'Modernist' texts can be and have been
read (deconstructed) in a postmodernist manner (See Barthes' S/Z for
example), and Pynchon's text can be read straight as well as 'bent'. It
is in this sense that all texts are pluralistic. The categories
(realist/naturalist, Modernist, postmodern) are better understood in
terms of the way text is read (and, of the way the author and reader
expect the text to be read).

"It was difficult even for us, old fans who've always been at the movies
(haven't we?) to tell which before the darkness swept in. The last image
was too immediate for any eye to register. It may have been ... " 760 

best