GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[Dave Monroe]

... well, an awful lot to cover, and I've awful little time to do it tonight,
but ...

Terrance wrote:

> Brian McHale,  claims, "nearly everything is lost in the
> translation. From first to last the reader's experience
> proves that GR will not boil down quite so readily to
> intelligible patterns of theme, or indeed to any of the
> patterns which we have learned to expect from Modernist
> texts."
>
> This claim would seem to undermine most studies of GR.

... but it's been a long time since McHale for me, but I've never worried much
about, i don't know, a bit of critical bricolage, sampling, whatever, taking a
bit from somehwere, using it to my own ends, or, at any rate, to whatever ends
are at hand.  "An idea is like a brick--you can build with it, or you can
throw it through a window"--Gilles Deleuze?  Something like that ...
deterritorialization, reterritorialization, whatever ... but, having now
forgotten just how I had wanted to deploy that distinction, I didn't want to
drop a name in order to draw on someone's alleged authority--rather, much like
yr more responsible and/or law-abiding samplologists, I just wanted to give
credit where credit was/is due, to cite my source, not in the sense of citing
authority, but in the sense of, well, citing my citation.  Didn't mean to drag
McHale "himself" into the procedings, though, reading your citation, your
reading of him, and recalling my own reading of Postmodernist Fiction
(Constructing Postmodernism was a far better work, I think, though, again,
it's been a while, perhaps since it was first published), BMcH, PF does indeed
tend rather to simplify, reify, that modern(ism/t)/posmodern(ism/t) binary, an
attendant chain of such inaries, epistemology/ontology, for starters, an esp.
tricky thing to negotiate when you are, indeed, dealing with a work that
seemingly tends rather to problematize inaries and the exclusion of middles
... but, nontheless, I do think there is a certain "postmodern" shift,
postmodernsim entails a certain shift, away from psychology, interority, maybe
even that there intersubjectivity, that triangulation, by which, say, one
might indeed derive what "really" happens in, say, William Faulkner's
(fictional) The Sound and the Fury, or (albeit perhaps more problematically
so, perhaps being alraedy on its way to postmodernity) WF's As I Lay Dying, or
... but, well, indeed, foregrounding the fictionality of fiction, which isn't
quite the same thing as, say, having an unreliable narrator (tres moderniste,
non?  that "unreliability" implying something "relaible" against which to
gauge said unreliability), which might indeed, by the way, althjough I'm just
free associating here now, constitute the ethical, political responsibility of
fiction, to emphasize that it is not reality, even while it might make a few
suggestions as to one's conduct therein, as to the conduct thereof, although,
yes, "Modernism" might well already have that Brechtian verfremmdungseffekt,
but, well, again (AGAIN) the problem might indded be the reification of that
mod/postmod divide, and, well, I really gotta go an salvage my laundry from a
flooded basement floor, so ... but I'll see what I can do to respoind to your
very pertinent questions, comments, indeed, as soon as possible (which might
or might not be in a day or so) ...