Pynchon the gentle sadomasochist

[Paul Mackin]

On Sun, 9 Jul 2000, Terrance wrote:
> 
> AND Faucault. 

Yes Foucault. Six mentions actually. By the way I should note that
references to various authors tend to be brief, often a mere
mention. No one seems to be relied on heavily. There are exceptions to
this. Tynjanov gets cited for the idea of the dominant. Several others
also but I can think of them at the moment.


> 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."
> 

I think McHale would say that in GR for example the reliability of the
narrators is not usually the center of attention. Rather it is the
different and inconsistent intersecting worlds of this or that character
that get the emphasis--which for McH of course is what makes GR
postmodernist. Other P books might be different.  The important point
is that the 1987 book is not in any degree a complete analysis of Pynchon
or a particular Pynchon work. Pynchon is merely used--though fairly
extensively--to illustrate general trends in fiction writing. Long
novels such as V. and GR can be expected to have required many many
stategies. The second person business is only one of them.

I'm going to have to finish the book I guess.

			P.