grgr (21): "you used to know what these words mean" (p. 472)

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

Lorentzen / Nicklaus wrote:
> 
>  there's an important article by brian mchale (- m&h as caps), which uses this
>  line as title. the subtitle is: "misreading  g r a v i t y ' s   r a i n b o w"
>  it was published in "language and style" in 1985, pp. 93-118. i give you the
>  last para (113):
> 
>  "pynchon's captain blicero imagines a lover, or rather an antilover, african
>  and black where his northern katje is blond, superior to the 'oven-game' they
>  play where katje seems trapped in it. 'perhaps', he muses, 'the black girl is a
>  genius of meta-solutions - knocking over the chessboard, shooting the referee'
>  (102). the metareader of  g r a v i t y ' s   r a i n b o w, overturner of
>  chessboards and shooters of referees, is called upon to be a 'genius of
>  metasolutions' by every second-person pronoun in the novel."

This paragraph is quite different in McHale's 'Constructing
Postmodernism' (1992), where he writes (113):

Finding ourselves, like Pynchon's own CaptainBlicero, locked
inside the limits of a game whose possibilities we begin we
have exhausted-- in Blicero's case, the game of sexual
domination; in ours, the game of literary
interpretation--perhaps, like him, we begin to dream of a
superior kind of game-player. Blicero dreams of a sexual
partner who would be the diametric opposite of his lover
Katje, black and African where Katje is blonde and northern,
mistress of the game where Katje appears to be its victim,
free where Katje is trapped. "Perhaps," he muses, "the black
girl is a genius of meta-solutions-knocking over the
chessboard, shooting the referee" (GR:102). Metareaders of
Gravity's Rainbow, we are solicited at every turn ("what?
You didn't like the haiku," Perhaps you know that dream
too," "you used to know what these words mean") to transform
ourselves into just such overturners of chessboards and
shooters of referees, just such geniuses of metasolutions. 

McHale's stuff is great, don't get me wrong, I recommend his
books, but I find that he tries to tackle way too much with
brief essays. 

Second, even when he acknowledges the debts of Postmodern
texts to Modern texts ("There is perhaps a mandate for this
sort of inquiry in Pynchon's obvious debt to modernist
theory and practice in his earlier fiction" CP.62),
correcting his own previous "misreading", he restricts the
obvious debt to concerns with "text-processing" and
qualifies his concession by allowing that Pynchon's "earlier
fiction" is where such debts are located. 

Third, McHale is so obviously a critic of the postmodern
school and at times he gets caught in his own reader trap.
He says, "Thomas Pynchon's GR holds a mirror up not so much
to Nature as to Reading." This is the oldest one trick pony
in the critics barn. As soon we see this allusion to the
mirror held up somehow to nature, the author, the implied
author, the speaker(s), the text, the reader, or some
transactional reader,  we know we that some equivalent to
Tom Wolfe's Wiz in 'A Man In Full' is going to start talking
"paradigm shifts" and "Negative Capability." Some revelation
or revolution is at hand, and Thomas R. Pynchon is in our
camp. Nonsense! 

One could say Plato or Shakespeare holds the mirror up to
the reader and not nature. In fact, a critic has written an
essay that takes this position, a position that is
Postmodern in approach, but does not fall into the trap of
claiming that Shakespeare was somehow postmodern. 

 To write about GR, I contend, requires that one quote much
more liberally from TRP's own texts than is the usual
practice in literary criticism. It also requires an
independence that is not fashionable and perhaps not
consistent with what is often required to conform with the
rules of literary criticism. How many articles have taken up
entropy and the Paranoid/ Anti-Paranoid critical stance to a
fault? How many critics (McHale leads the pack) equate the
reader with GR characters or TRP and characters. The text is
a mirror held up to what?  

The biggest problem is the enormity and complexity of a text
like GR. Critics usually take up one aspect of GR and
develop an essay that cannot possibly address the
multiplicies, contradictions, ambiguities, present in the
text. Indeterminate they say. How else can they account for
the vast number of mutually incompatible interpretations?
It's the blind men's elephant held up to a mirror? To do
justice to the text's multifariousness, when addressing a
particular passage or scene it is necessary to bring in all
the analogous passages, even those that contradict. This is
one of the advantages of grgr. 

Pynchon plays on the "paranoia" of his audience just as
Shakespeare played on his audience's desire for resolute
action. TRP is our contemporary, so we lack a certain
distance, but critics have been too mindful of
interpretative paranoia and have thus opted for a critical
stance that is often as tricky and as slippery as GR itself.
It's indeterminate, Pynchon is setting you on a quest too
fail. Reader trap! McHale's "conditioned" reader must try
but ultimately fail. But Pynchon recognizes that the quest
for meaning, for patterns, for interpretation, is not only a
basic human need, it is an affirmative "mindless
pleasure."       


> 
>  though i find his way to get there sometimes a little complicated and even dry,
>             i whole-heartedly support mchales pleading
>                       for  o n t o l o g i c a l  p l u r a l i s m !

Does McHale say, "Ontological Pluralism" or what?