implicit norms of P's narrative

Lear's Fool lycidas2 at earthlink.net
Mon Feb 26 14:15:08 CST 2001


I've been suggesting that there are  narrative norms, the
implicit norm of P's narratives tells us what he thinks 
about subjects like the war on drugs or the Holocaust, his
ethics, his politics.  In the early stories and V. it's
easier to determine and again in VL and CL49, but to locate
these in GR is very difficult, but it's possible. As Eddins
has demonstrated GR represents a maturation of P's
gnostic/existentialism. Enzian is good case to study. Note
that when Enzian rejects the status of Hero, when he
forbears his paranoid delusions-- delusions of grandeur
being a common symptom of both Positive (the world was made
by a benevolent god and is connected in a beneficent design
of which I am a part)  and Negative paranoia (the world was
made by a demiurge and is connected in a hostile design of
which I am its particular victim). 


Note also that Godolphin says that his trip was to a place
the DEMIURGE forgot, not God. 
This is V's realm and in Mondaugen's Story we will go to
this place again, a nostalgic swing of the clock to an
extreme, to siege, to the year of V's great triumph over
life, where the rotation of the planets, the mechanical
Spheres of influence driven by a Slave brings a perverse
sex/death party to reading or the case that is the static
world or the white polar stillness, or the world or Kingdom
that Weissmann and V (Greta) hope to regain (we are getting
the protectorate back he says or something like that). But
I'm jumping ahead so...



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