GRGR(30): You will want cause and effect.

[Terrance]

Jeremy Osner wrote:
> 
> To my ear a beautiful opening sentence; again Pynchon is playing with
> the line separating me from the book, bringing me in as a character or
> at least as an acknowledged audience. And yes, I *was* hoping for a
> little C&E, wondering how all the characters I had become so attached to
> were doing; so reading this sentence was a minor satori (I think is what
> they call it, over there in that Japan), brought me a little deeper into
> total identification with the Book.

Don't be anxious, YOU are not a character in this drama and
you needn't be a conditioned reader groping bootless or like
Slothrop, in some one else's shoes or bed for cause and
effect conventionality. Cause and effect is a major problem
for some of the characters in GR, mostly the scientists.
However, as we are not McHale's conditioned readers [CP.81],
Thomas Pynchon is not a Pointsman. He is not and we are not
Oedipa, Stencil, Benny, or Wicks Cherrycoke either, but
that's another tumble down the rabbit's hole. Perhaps by
looking at why the characters in GR want cause and effect we
can decide if we want it and if the narrator who claims, 
"You will want cause and effect. All right" [663], is only
another Wizard / Humpty Dumpty playing tricks and that
behind the curtain and through the looking glass is a world
where cause and effect, like time and space, dissolve into
the mysterious abyss where only the "breath of God" [454]
exists and "only God can tell" [6] the difference between
his will and "operations of pure chance" [323] and where the
YOU is not you the reader "obsessed with the idea of getting
hit in the head by a lightning bolt" [663] issued from the
pen of Thomas Pynchon. 

Why do the scientists and some others need or want cause and
effect? Do we want it when we read GR?  

> >
> 
> > 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.

What I am suggesting here is that GR does not concur with
McHale's description of a "Post-Modern" text. (BTW, I agree
with Paul, both of McHale's books are excellent, but as I
have stated
here many times, the conditioned reader is ridiculous. 

McHale describes the "post-Modern" text as a contemporary
fiction that is very self-conscious, self reflective,
self-critical; which by laying bare their own devices,
continually problem of the relation between the game-like
artifices of fiction and the imitation of reality; which
actively resist and subvert the reader's efforts to make
sense of them in the familiar novelistic way. 

Obviously GR does all of these things, however, McHale, and
I think your comments as well, go further. It's this further
that I wish to address. GR does not concur with McHale's
description of the "PostModern" text because while it may
subverts and ridicule novelistic conventions, those
conventions still make up a large portion of the narrative.
Pynchon does not break the author/reader contract, while it
is clearly the case that GR badgers the reader with 
subversive post-modern technique, it seems to me that what
Pynchon has done in the text is what is obviously the case
in all the conflicting aspects of the text, he sets up a
tension, a Moderinst/Post Modernist tension if you will and
neither side
gives in. 

> >
> > Is GR, in Barthe's terms, "beyond criticism altogether?
> >
> Depends what you mean by "criticism".

I'm quoting Barthes, he says that texts which elicit in the
reader "rapture[s] of dislocation produced by ruptures or
violations of intelligibility are "hors-critique", beyond
criticism altogether. 

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

Certainly!

> >
> I think it's that movement from the scriptible to the lisible again, isn't
> it?

For Barthes, the readable (lisible) text is based on logical
or temporal order and allows the reader to reconstruct a
"story" while the writable (scriptible) text baffles
standard reading expectations by drawing attention to the
conventionality of narrative procedures thereby revealing
the illusory character of a fictional "reality."