Discussion Tip Of The Day

[Dave Monroe]

Recalling Mikhail Bakhtin's characterization, valorization of Fyodor
Dostoevsky as an author of "heteroglossic," "polyphonic," whatever works
which, if they do not necessarily, entirely efface any sort of
"authorial" voice, render it as one amongst the many voices of the
characters therein (Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics)--something like
that, at any rate--I'm nonetheless inclined to agree that perhaps there
is a Pynchonian "authorial" voice--or, perhaps more properly, perhaps
there are Pynchonian "authorial" voices--of sorts weaving its (their)
way in and out of those Pynchonian texts.  A problem indeed, where,
when, not to mention why, and to what effect? but ...

But my reaction here is that it's perhaps both more pronounced than that
putative Dostoevskian, perhaps ultimately modernist, "author," even
while even more heteroglossically, polyphonically mixed, in, precisely,
that recording sense, in that peculiar way in which many distinct sounds
can be heard as such all at once (hm ... think here of Erich Auerbach's,
for starters, discussion of vision vs. hearing in Mimesis: The
Representation of Reality in Literature?  No end of literature on the
phenomology of sight vs. sound along these lines ...), but, again, with
no small amount of signal bleed, a nigh unto Spectorian recording
session, three pianos, multiple drum sets, sleighbells, reverb a-plenty,
a-and maybe a mad genius behind the mixing board (handgun optional) ...

Resulting, I'd say, in an "authorial," but not necessarily in an
"authoritative," voice?  That "postmodern(ist)" self-reflexivity,
self-abnegation, self-deprecation, even, and not QUITE self-effacement,
which seems more of a "modernist" tack, getting "inside the heads," in
the stream of consciousness, of one's characters, Joyce, Woolf,
Faulkner, et al., to varying degrees, in various texts.   Reminds me,
for whatever reason, of something somebody once wrote about David
Letterman: "he has a weak ego but a strong sense of self."  The author
as one voice, one character, one narrator, one whatever, among many, to
the point where s/he might even be overcome by those other voices
(Gilbert Sorrentino, Mullgan Stew?), or, at any rate, mixed in amongst
the general clamor, to the point of not quite being alembically
distillable ...