Pynchon the gentle sadomasochist

[Terrance]

Paul Mackin wrote:
> 
> Negative as far as the two works I have seen. Neither Freud nor Lacan
> either for the Eros angle. Cites mostly fiction writers
> but also structuralist, post-structuralists, semioticians, litcriters,
> culturecriters. Derrida, Bathes, Lyotard, many more. Barth, Gass, Gardner
> as critics. An interesting outlier is Douglas Hofstatder. Strange loops
> are considered. Did I mention Woody Allen? Pynchon's name is dropped 40
> times according to the index. That could be the record.

AND Faucault. 
> 
> > > > > In discussing the use of the second person pronoun as a means of
> > > > > violating the ontological boundaries between writer, reader, and
> > > > > character, McHale comes to the conclusion that the actual subject
> > > > reefers and shivers, cut my throat....oh! God, oh!
> > >
> > > Yes, an imaginative performance but a critic is entitled to push the
> > > data sometimes if in a good cause.
> >
> > Could it be that McHale's reading of GR's narrator's is a
> > misreading? Does he have these relationship correct, the one
> > between author and reader?
> 
> Well, one thing he has going for him is that violating ontological
> boundaries (by addressing the reader directly) is a just about perfect
> metephor for love making. And his examples of the use of the second person
> pronoun all seem to me to be valid cases of the narrator speaking directly
> to the reader. He also gives examples where 'you' has other meanings and
> some of the reader-you examples also are at the same time character-you
> examples as in the Pointsman quote. You might argue that, since his
> case--that addressing the reader signifies love making--depends so much
> on an aggressive stance on the part of the narrator, McHale may see
> these aggressions  and assaults more than is actually justified in
> the text. I can't quite always see Pynchon as the forceful lover.

Narrators and naratees, reader and author, reliability and
unreliability, text processing, second person, yes, ok, but
does it make any sense that Pynchon, the author of V., the
author that that turns to fetish and S&M to present the
horrors of the Modern world is himself a Pointsman? Even
though McHale argues some strange purging of the audience,
does this make sense, that the book is a laboratory?  Some
narrators are out to bully the reader, to lie, to confuse,
some are mad, some are stereotypes of paranoid 60s ideology,
some are confused,  and two of the things McHale sets out
to  explore are "text processing" and "reliability and
unreliability", two daunting tasks.  How does one read? What
goes on when reading? But more importantly, if only because
it can be managed, is reliability and unreliability. In GR,
the narrators are not only unreliable (also, GR is compared
with Melviille's Confidence Man by both Weisenburger and
Tanner), they also  embody the same ambiguous interrelation
of realistic descriptions and  elements that characters do
(characters often narrate in GR)  which, as Tanner says,
make the "ontological status of the figures... radically
uncertain."