V.V.(1) Carnival and the picaresque - some remarks and questions

[Thomas Eckhardt]

Just a few quick (so, please, pardon my French, uh, English) questions and notes
concerning jbor's contributions which I would have liked to be able to address
in more detail. About a week ago jbor provided a whole lot of substantial
thoughts about and background for the genre of the picaresque, among them:

> Helen Reed discloses the
> search of the pícaro as the quest
>
>    for a place *in* society. ... In contrast to the epic where
>    the hero ventures forth *in behalf of* society, or romance where the hero
>    sets out in quest of some far-off, otherworldly, mysterious goal
>    *outside* society, the pícaro's aim is limited in scope, egotistical,
>    ignoble, and of this world - to have enough money and food to survive and
>    to find a place *within* society. (Helen H. Reed, *The Reader in the
>    Picaresque Novel*, Tamesis, London, 1984, p. 21.)

Is the aim of Profane's quest really "a place in society"? Is he on a quest at
all? I have the general impression that as a yo-yo he is more or less being
constantly pushed around by forces outside of his reach, trying to get along as
good as he can. Of course, he wants to "have enough money and food to survive",
but I am not so sure about whether the second part of Reed's statement is
applicable here.

Stencil on the other hand, who definitely is on a quest, to me in the light of
the quote from Reed seems to be not so much a character of the picaresque but of
romance. What he obsessively wants is to find out what lies at the core of
History, which is to say that just like Ahab he is searching for the meaning of
the universe. And, again just like Ahab, he believes that he can get hold of the
object of his paranoid quest and that this will provide him with an ultimate
understanding of the workings of the world. Thus V as a multiple
character/symbol is very similar to "the ingraspable phantom of life" aka Moby
Dick - and both of them can be seen "far-off, otherworldly, mysterious goals
outside society".

I certainly agree with the statement that

> these and
> each subsequent picaresque narrative also comprise, in large part, a series
> of "metafictive" dialogues with their predecessors in the tradition. In
> other words, intertextuality and parody are conscious and overt features of
> the picaresque repertoire, as they are also in the postmodern novel:

It is one important feature of what we call "postmodern" or "contemporary" or
"it depends" or "whatever" fiction that this kind of literature seems to be
extremely conscious of the history of literature as well as of the history and
the basic assumptions of historiography. As far as the reader's direct
experience is concerned (I am wilfully switching over to matters of literary
evaluation here) there certainly must be something else, though, because,
frankly, I find Calvino and Eco (with the exception of "The Name of the Rose"
which I thought was okay) rather boring, whereas I am still  utterly fascinated
by the likes of Cortazar and Pynchon. Just my personal opinion, of course.

> Unlike other literary genres of the Middle Ages and Renaissance such as the
> epic, courtly romance, pastoral, saint's life and moral fable, where form,
> style and content were bound by convention and moral decorum, the directions
> and contours of the pícaro's narrative are far more flexible. As Helen Reed
> asserts, and reminiscent of the obsessive narrativisation and resistance to
> closure in much postmodern fiction, the pícaro "cannot stop recounting his
> life, because it is not over yet. ... Open-endedness and the demands on the
> reader's active participation in arriving at the work's significance
> distinguish the novel from earlier forms of fiction." (Reed, p. 29)

It might be important to note here that V. is not an "autobiography" of Benny
Profane, although I believe his personal POV and the narrator's stance are often
especially hard to tell apart.

> On this cf. also Robbe-Grillet's conclusion in his essay 'Time and
> Description in Fiction Today' (1963), in *For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
> (translated by Richard Howard), Ayer, Salem, 1984 (1965):
>
>    The author today proclaims his [sic] absolute need of the reader's
>    co-operation, an active, conscious, creative assistance. What he asks of
>    him [sic] is no longer to receive ready-made a world completed, full,
>    closed upon itself, but on the contrary to participate in a creation, to
>    invent in his turn the work -- and the world -- and thus to learn to
>    invent his own life. (p. 156)

This is obviously true for Cortazars great "Hopscotch" and also, almost but not
quite as explicitly foregrounded in the text itself, for GR ("You will want
cause and effect" etc.)

I thought jbor's second post on the topic was right on the mark, especially
insofar as a tradition of the novel was concerned that Pynchon's novels perhaps
might be said to owe a thing or two to. Whether one would like to call them
Menippean satires, encyclopedic narratives or picaresque novels - though the
latter one seems to be indeed far too narrow a term - Tristram Shandy, Moby
Dick, Ulysses and Pynchon's works seem to share some characteristics not to be
found in, say, Fielding, Austen or Flaubert. One of these characteristics IMHO
would be the assimilation of popular culture and its modes into the text not
only as subjects which, just like everything else, are treated in a realistic
manner, but as principles of formal organization. There seems to be a
significant difference between Flaubert describing the romantic illusions of
Emma Bovary in psychological detail and Pynchon incorporating a stereotypical
romantic plot, a story with firm roots in the popular consciousness - with the
ever present hints at sexual fantasies made explicit, to be sure -, like the
captive's tale in M&D as actually happening. I am thinking also of the chase
scenes etc. in GR here.

In any case, Bakhtin and his reflections upon the carneval spirit, the grotesque
and the "monological" vs. the "dialogical novel" (a novel in which various POV
are presented without priority given to just one voice) seem to be very, very
useful if one wishes to describe how Pynchon's books are not only consciously
opposing prevalent mainstream or official modes of representations but also a
whole lot of subcultural notions of how to oppose the system (I am thinking of
the critique of the decadent life-style of the Whole Sick Crew that I perceive
in V. here; I hope I will get around to post more on this topic during the
discussion of the next chapter of V.) , and how he turns back to older forms of
the novel and/or views of popular culture to achieve that goal.

Or something like this. Over to cj.

Thanks,
Thomas