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

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> > Take a look at the language of McHale, he describes the
> > reader of GR as, "conned, bullied, betrayed, embarrassed,
> > conditioned, lured, offended, and he applies the most
> > horrible metaphors in GR to the reader as if the reader were
> > a character, a dog or one "fox" in the narrative.
> 
> Yes, strong words. But *GR* isn't exactly a picnic for the reader either.
> And it's not that McHale "applies" these metaphors himself. His thesis is
> that the text (eg. in the ambiguity and indeterminacy of first and second
> person pronoun usages) actually addresses the reader thus.

Yes, the person pronoun usage, we can talk about that, but
he applies metaphors and a few of the most complex concepts
from the the novel, for example,  the Paranoia(s) and
Conditioning  to
the reader. He admits that his use of the paranoid concepts,
which he uses as metaphor for the reader's "text
processing"  are, at least in part, unadvised and
extravagant. 

 "My use of the metaphors of paranoia may seem extravagant
but it is not wholly unadvised."  De-Conditioning


We should bare in mind that McHale's thesis has little to do
with GR and that in his Introduction he states, "No doubt
there 'is' no such 'thing' as postmodernism." He goes on to
say that his previous book was a language game and the
present one a narrative. Oh rocks tell us in plain word!
McHale's thesis in the GR chapters, as far as I can tell,
is, GR and postmodern "Text Processing."
What the hell is "text processing" anyway? McHale opens a
can of worms with this one because he will need to deal
with the reading process, oh boy, oh girl, oh my, and as he
says, with
"Unreliability and Reliability", oh no!  


My issues with McHale are many, but here are a few:

First, his approach discounts or undermines or scoffs at 
other critical
approaches. Second, his "text processing" approach is not
supported by any solid scholarship on what happens during
the
reading process. Third, his  use of  language like, "the
reader, in order to reassert mastery over the text", or "the
reader has every right to feel conned, bullied, betrayed",
or "the conditioned reader", or "misreading", and the
application of horrible metaphors from the darkest of GR's
nightmares to the Dear reader are not only extravagant, they
are wholly unadvised. Fourth, he argues that GR is designed
in a way that will not only embarrass and harass the dear
reader but will thwart all attempts at reconstruction and 
render all "translations" or "paraphrasing" invalid,
including the approaches that may in fact be just fine for
good old Modernist texts, because GR destabilizes
"novelistic ontology." Fifth, his use of Barthes (see the
bits from shadows passage) is liberal to a fault. Sixth, he
blames Pynchon for holding the mirror up to reading and not
nature, when he is the one holding Plato's mirror up to
"text processing." 

Again, I am not suggesting that GR does not have the
elements of the the post War genre
that McHale describes and rejects in favor of his text
processing, de-conditioning, parasnoia(s),  the
"Post-Modern" text, Post, as in
after Modern. He says,   "a contemporary fiction that is
very
self-conscious, self reflective, self-critical; which by
laying bare their own devices, continually raise 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."  McHales slides the genre approach
aside in favor of his post modern text processing approach,
his definition(s), his narratives, that include a
misapplication of Pynchon's most complex nightmares as
metaphors for the reading process.  

 

"La tierra lleva por la tierra; mas tu, mar, llevas por el
cielo. 
				---Juan Ramon Jimenez