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

[Lycidas at worldnet.att.net]

McHale claims, "nearly everything is lost in the
translation. From first to last the reader's experience
proves that GR will not boil down quite so readily to
intelligible patterns of theme, or indeed to any of the
patterns which we have learned to expect from Modernist
texts." 

This claim would undermine most studies of GR. Any study
that takes up, say, how pornography functions in GR, or
religion or politics, or entropy, intertextuality, comedy,
satire, paranoia, subtext, or any part of the indeterminate
whole is a misreading since any partial study depends on
prior assumptions concerning the central meaning of the
literary artifact. Critics that take this position assert
that the sum of the parts cannot be compared to the
indeterminate whole or that GR lacks a central subject
(vehicle) or even a hierarchy of subjects and it moves from
place to place without reason or purpose. 

All attempts to reconstruct are not going to work. Why?
Because GR destabilizes, among other things,  "novelistic
ontology." And "novelistic ontology" (the mirror is turning)
is an element where the "conditioned readers" of Modernists
texts generally found their point of view. So, looking back,
with this simple way of looking at it, while the
pre-Modernist text would permit a reconstruction through
mediation of an omniscient and usually a more or less
reliable narrator, Modernism complicated reconstruction by
employing narrators with a limited point of view or even
rendering them imperceptible. What's more, unreliability was
limited to the "fictive world" and was of an
"epistemological" rather than "ontological" nature, still
allowing for the reconstruction of an external fictive
reality. McHale's argument claims that in the Modernist
novel, where several mediating consciousness were
introduced,  "triangulation," that is, the movement from one
consciousness to another through coordinates in the 'real'
visible, audible, tangible, etc. remained relatively
stable, but in GR, the narrator disorientates the  reader of
pre-Modernist texts and the "conditioned" modernist reader,
since "triangulation" in GR does not permit the
reconstruction of the 'real' situation in which the contents
of one mind are accessible to another. Paradigm shift &
"Negative capability." Re-education, de-conditioning. 

Questions 

How can a subversion of the narrative succeed without being
itself internally organized in certain ways? How can GR
break the modernist rules without stating them implicitly?
As David Lodge sez, "if postmodernism really succeeds in
expelling the idea of order (whether expressed in metonymic
or metaphoric form) from modern writing, then it would truly
abolish itself, by destroying the norms against which we
perceive its deviation." 

Doesn't the "Counterforce" fail because it refuses to
organize itself? 

Is GR, in Barthe's terms, "beyond criticism altogether?

Beyond interpretation?

GR is still a book, words organized on pages, and if the
number of signifieds is potentially infinite, the number of
singnifiers is not. For interpretation to become possible,
isn't it necessary that a text provide us with some
indication as to which meanings are permitted and which may
be excluded? Now, you postmodernists will laugh at me now,
for the postmodern text does not allow for or call for
restrictions (my inverted Oak tree) but rather disperses
with "playfulness" or to use Barthe's terms again, replaces
"denotation with "connotation." So, a Menippean approach, in
fact, any formal evaluation of features of genre (style,
perspective and so on) is not valuable, is not possible and
the sole distinction between relevant and irrelevant devices
is arbitrary. 

But if this is the case with postmodern texts, with GR, can
a reader determine how Pynchon's narrative intricacies are
internally motivated? Are we to understand them as mimetic
reflections of the complexities of the modern or postmodern
world or as particular intellectual assumptions implicit in
the narrative? 

Turn the mirror on the writing for a moment. 

Writing, David Lodge says, "especially writing of narrative,
is a process of constant choice and decision making: to make
your hero do this rather than that, to describe the action
from this angle rather than that. How can one decide such
questions except in terms of some overall design--which is
in some sense a design upon one's putative reader."

Lodge also notes, that it is in particular comedy which
"offers most resistance to post-structualist aesthetics,"
and GR is loaded with comedy.

How do we account for Pynchon's statement in the
Introduction to Slow Learner, that his apprentice exercises
were too top heavy with concepts and "assbackwards" in terms
of plot and character development? 

How is this related to GRGR? Well, so much of our discussion
here hinges on the post-structualist's approach. I don't
think Pynchon "privileges" such an approach. And it is a
"privileged" approach--"misreading", "conditioned",
subverted expectations of pattern that must be undermined
for the reader to experience the "rapture." Does Pynchon
turn the mirror away from Nature and hold it up to Reading?
Or is the mirror turning in the hands of the critic?