GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb

[jbor]

----------
>From: Terrance <Lycidas at worldnet.att.net>
>Subject: Re: GRGR(29) - The Grid, The Comb
>Date: Mon, Jul 3, 2000, 12:18 PM
>

> Questions:
>
> How can a subversion of the narrative succeed without being
> itself internally organized in certain ways?
>
"Succeed" isn't quite the right word here. The text subverts the reader's
expectations of a "novel" by not adhering to the conventions (whether
Modernist, realist, epistolary) of what such a thing is supposed to be. The
reader is then forced to consider why it is that a "novel" should have been
expected to be thus and not something else in the first place -- who made
these rules, and why? Narrative and thematic organisation are still present
in the text, but these are not consistently modulated, are deliberately
fragmentary or multi-focussed, and cannot thus be fixed.

> How can GR break the modernist rules without stating them
> implicitly?
>
If the rules are implicit this would seem to imply that they are unstated,
wouldn't it? Author and reader know what the "rules" are already.

> As David Lodge sez, "if postmodernism really succeeds in
> expelling the idea of order (whether expressed in metonymic
> or metaphoric form) from modern writing, then it would truly
> abolish itself, by destroying the norms against which we
> perceive its deviation."

Isn't this semantics?
>
> Is GR, in Barthe's terms, "beyond criticism altogether?
>
Depends what you mean by "criticism".

> Beyond interpretation?
>
Beyond a finite interpretation, certainly.

> GR is still a book, words organized on pages, and if the
> number of signifieds is potentially infinite, the number of
> singnifiers is not, right?
>
Um ... yes ... but it isn't humanly possible to have them all in your head
at once.
>
> If interpretation is possible (can we discuss Barthes'
> readable writable?)  isn't it necessary that a text provide
> us with some indication as to which meanings are permitted
> and which may be excluded?
>
No, I think a reader does these things.
>
> What does Barthes mean when he says,  "denotation" is
> replaced with "connotation"?
>
I think it's that movement from the scriptible to the lisible again, isn't
it?

>  Can a reader of GR  determine how Pynchon's narrative
> intricacies are internally motivated?
>
What does "internally motivated" mean?

> Are we to understand them as mimetic reflections of the
> complexities of the modern or postmodern
> world or as particular intellectual assumptions implicit in
> the narrative?
>
Both these things and more I would say.

> Turn the mirror away from reading and back to writing for a
> moment.
>
> Writing, David Lodge says, "especially writing of narrative,
> is a process of constant choice and decision making: to make
> your hero do this rather than that, to describe the action
> from this angle rather than that. How can one decide such
> questions except in terms of some overall design--which is
> in some sense a design upon one's putative reader."
>
> Lodge also notes, that it is in particular comedy which
> "offers most resistance to post-structualist esthetics."
>
> PS CLT, yes, Cooperative Learning, you know where that term
> comes from?

Um ... no, but it is a fairly common pedagogical practice, particularly in
language teaching, ESL, EFL, literacy and so forth. Effective, too.

best