Theatre/Theater. The Text Machine Gets on the Stage...

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Theatre/Theater

I like McHoul & Wills and McHale on this theatre, cinema
stuff, though I think the "failure" (McHale) or the
"impossibility of sorting out" (M&W) cinematic and real or
real and hallucination or Mrs. Quoad(s) and Darlene and so
forth is ultimately more a fascination of critics (the "CLT"
"'exegetical drive'") than some conditioned reader's
problem.   Like M&W I find "McHales's "hang-ups" and his
notion of a "conditioned reader" something I simply can't
relate to. I think it's funny that McHale keeps arguing that
it's not his "hang-up" but the conditioned readers--That's
YOU!  

See: Cowart, Thomas Pynchon,pp. 31-62;  Stark, Pynchon's
Fiction, pp. 132-45; Simmon, Beyond the Theater of War: GR
as Film, in Critical Essays, ed. R. Pearce, pp. 124-39;
Clerc, Film in GR, in Approaches to GR, ed. Clerc, pp.
103-51, Grace, Fritz Lang and the 'Paracinematic Lives of
GR, Modern Fiction Studies, 9, No.4 (Winter 1983), pp.
655-70,  



M&W divide theatre into use and mention and I think this is
a good start (not in McHale's sense that M&W is good start
to reading GR).     

I'm not much interested in the "reading process" and how the
reader is trapped or deconditioned or victimized. I am more
interested in Pynchon's use of "use and mention" of film by
characters and as Universal conspiracy. This is obviously a
big topic. I like to dig into the merging of psychology,
religion, philosophy and history and look at the realms of
time and space that Pynchon separates but renders permeable
and what M&W don't reccommend--the "grand unifying theme" 
and another thing they don't recommend, Pynchon's
hermeneutic or the extra or out of the text "texts" and
sub-text. The principle reference text is Rilke. We could,
make a long list of books that are important to the theatre
of GR--Marshall McLuhan, Weber, Brown, so on and so on, but
Rilke is used (and used and mentioned by characters) in a
different way and more extensively than any we would put on
the list. Both Pynchon and Rilke ask the same age-old
questions about Man, his world, the cosmos and Man's place
in it. In both authors it is human consciousness that is the
cause of what we might call the second falling--a separation
from the "whole" and the resulting antagonistic
relationships that Man experiences. The answers that Pynchon
offers to these age-old questions is often an ironic play on
both the current state of affairs and the answers that Rilke
provides.  

Now to bring this back to theatre/theaeter I will begin
posting some of the Rilke stuff I have been putting
together. 

PS I think Rossini is 50



Thomas Colin wrote:
> 
>    What follows is not directly about the theatre/theater problem, but on
> theatre and theatricality in general, in GR.
>    Interestingly enough, the first occurrence on p3 ("it's all theatre") is
> a metaphor *in presentia,* that is explicitly emphasised through a syntactic
> link which relates usually differentiated modes of consciousness, and
> bridges the gap between the real and the imaginary, reality and its staging
> into a textual form. In a way, it erases the notion of an extralinguistic
> reality, independent from any act of perception. So what we have from the
> beginning is an altered perception, a dream, where the real is put at a
> distance and de-naturalized : "it will be a spectacle."
>    If the metaphor is in presentia and the spectacle presented as a
> virtually programmatic statement, is it still a metaphor? In the end it
> seems to compel the reader to reconsider his/her notions of such dualities s
> metaphorical and literal meanings, image and object (this is interesting
> when we come to the cinematic simulation), word and referent (through the
> signifier/signified filter), and also voice and subject, that is the idea
> that a speech, as in the theatre, necessarily comes from some actor on
> stage. This is radically thrown into question in GR.
>     So from here we have a theatre problematics which is  a problematics of
> reversibility : with on the one hand the real perceived as theatre, and on
> the other hand theatre perceived as the real. Thus lain "ass backwards," we
> can artificially divide  theatracility in GR into two categories: mentions
> of theatre (and cinema), and use of the theatrical and cinematic form.
> 
>     Through the mentions of theatre, generally occurring at a moment of
> revelation, the narrative voice takes on a hermeneutic position that
> redoubles that of the reader, as decipherer of a real which his new lucidity
> defines as veiled : a "puppet stage" (152). The real is then artificial
> within the fictional text, and the true real (the Real, the Text) is always
> underneath, or beyond, at several remotes. "Their" power is then a power of
> alienation and illusion, quiet reminiscent of Debord's Society of the
> Spectacle. By confusiong signs and phenomena, the society of the spectacle
> (that is basically, the world we live in, folks) manages to invalidate both
> : signs are fetichized and the real is as malleable as a text of fiction :
> "La realite objective est presente des deux cotes. Chaque notions ainsi
> fixee n'a pour fond que son passage dans l'oppose : la realite surgit dans
> le spectacle, et le spectacle est reel. (Objective reality is present on
> both sides. The end of each notion thus defined is to pass over to the
> opposite side : reality looms up from the spectacle, and the spectacle is
> real.)
>    Thing is: once we get a Real, an a Text (the Rocket? asks Enzian), it
> could mean that the real, and the text of GR are only staging, performances
> of It. This staging being redoubled by the performance and the staging of
> the reading-process, another interpretative layer, another filtering lens.
> Of course the Text cannot be read (just like God's intention in the Bible is
> subject to endless interpretation for the Puritan). Thus paranoia as an
> obscessive-compulsive struggle against the undeterminacy of all things, at
> all levels. In the end the most stable entity is the reading conscience (and
> again, not always), as stage director of an all-englobing stage. This is
> where theatre no longer as mention, but as use (almost strategic use) comes
> up. This stage is the dimension where "theatre might be the reading of a
> book, its writing in operation." (Mallarme via Julia Kristeva in "Word
> Dialogue, and Novel, *Desire in Language* Columbia UP).
>   So what about the "theatre" as deceptive acting and the "theater" as
> active recognition? hu? well... dunno.
>   This, one more time, was a really quick overview. So questions, comments,
> insults, bashings, welcome...
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