Brian McHale's article

[Gary Thompson]

Worth reading, though I only had time for a quick skim today. The
argument (among other things) is that postmodernism is too amorphous a
term, that PM writers have various targets--the French sort aiming at
Balzacian realism, and Pynchon aiming at modernism with its discrete and
separable voices. McHale establishes pretty convincingly, through an
assemblage of examples, that P offers alternative constructions of
reality, which not infrequently lead incautious critics to errors of
interpretation (e.g., assuming that Pokler did in fact commit incest
with his Ilse).

I had a note last June that I didn't post, which offers a minor
illustration of this bleeding between "voices" (I think McHale calls
this mapping).

6/10--re Pynchon list exchanges: [context was the comment of the dog
pursued by Pointsman and Mexico]
I haven't been anxious to enter the dog and narration threads (or
dog-and-narration thread), as rj and others have been having such a good
time with it, and I've been otherwise occupied. Whatever is said about
the narrative voice, this dipping into and out of characters'
consciousnesses is one of the most characteristic and surprising
features of GR. Besides [the Advent chapter], I was thinking about
Slothrop's supposed rescue of Katje from the octopus (186): "She reaches
out a hand, a soft-knuckled child's hand with a man's steel ID bracelet
on the wrist, and clutches at Slothrop's Hawaiian shirt, begins
tightening her own grip there, and who was to know that among her last
things would be vulgar-faced hula girls, ukuleles, and surfriders all in
comic-book colors . . ."

The paragraph this comes from is mostly from that narrative voice
("Slothrop's up, bottle in hand," etc.), which is external to the
characters but interested in their fates--no indifferent paring of the
fingernails here. As elsewhere, there's an occasional entry into
Slothrop's consciousness ("and wow it's a _big_ one, holycow--") and a
pause for description ("Hermit crabs slide in death-struggle around his
foot") that gives us a startling and unprecedented (I think) perspective
outside of humanity. What other novelist stops in the middle of the
action to remind us what the hermit crabs think? Or to note that they
are in a real death struggle as much as Slothrop and Katje are in a
staged one? And then that "who was to know" bit, which gives us a
viewpoint identified with Katje but not quite phrased as she would
("vulgar-faced"?). I don't think that here or in the dog capture this is
an unsettling indeterminacy, but an entertaining slipperiness which can
accommodate improbability (A hula shirt? On the Riviera?) and shifts
between versions of first and third person and even introduce
anachronisms (it helps that Pynchon's been so painstaking with his
periodizing details) without major disruption. I don't think P's other
books do this--do they?

. . . Pynchon follows this practice even with (especially with) the
presumed villains of the piece--there's Pointsman being serviced by Maud
Chilkes in the closet (168-69), and what's passing through his mind is
the precise dosage he used to fall asleep the night before so as to be
able to chemically induce what he supposes must be a wet dream . . .
it's characteristic and interesting and really funny.

Just thought I'd toss this in re one small part of McHale's essay, which
I like a lot. The format is pretty crummy [presumably not his
responsibility].

Gary Thompson



JBFRAME at aol.com wrote:

> An essay on Pynchon & post modernism by Brian McHale:
>
> http://spinoza.tau.ac.il/hci/pub/poetics/art/mod6.html