V.V. (17) current chapter

[jbor]

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>From: Doug Millison <millison at online-journalist.com>
 
> Nesting of narratives is a very old literary device and I fail to see
> it as a defining characteristic of PoMo - unless you want to untether
> PoMo  from its late 20th century historical context and open it to
> all literary works with  nested narratives.

This is exactly what some commentators have done (eg Eco, Federman). There's
no problem with reading the novel in terms of its historical context *and*
in terms of a possibly transhistorical literary genre is there? Unless, of
course, there is some other reason why one would want to "tether" what is to
be allowed as literary interpretation?

Postmodern fiction embraces eclecticism. With a passion. The fact that the
nesting of narratives has always been a standard literary tactic really
doesn't have any bearing on the issue of its typicality for the postmodern
"genre". The big difference is that when it is used in a traditional novel
or text (eg. the _Canterbury Tales_, M. Shelley's _Frankenstein_, _Wuthering
Heights_, _Heart of Darkness_, _Gatsby_ etc) it is used *consistently*, and
as such is intended to *conceal* the author's hand, to render an appearance
of "reality", in order to better elicit the reader's "suspension of
disbelief". In a reflexive text the literary artifice is announced and
foregrounded as such (_Ulysses_, Beckett's novels), and in a postmodern text
it is often used in combination with various other, apparently contradictory
modes (eg. _Don Quixote_, _Tristram Shandy_, contemporary postmodern fiction
such as Pynchon's novels). These categories aren't hard and fast, of course,
but in general terms it's the deliberate self-consciousness of the text as
text (and as intertext), which distinguishes the postmodern work. (Roland
Barthes nomination of "readerly" and "writerly" texts is also useful here.)

Pynchon's pun below would appear to indicate his awareness that there's not
just a finite "second story", as Hollander might argue, but *multiple*,
perhaps potentially infinite, stories in operation (ie. that parenthetic "or
ninth-", which Doug conveniently ignores, conveys this self-consciousness).
Much of the current chapter itself, filled with retold (and no doubt
embellished) tales of Navy life exemplifies just this aspect of literary
"theft", of Pynchon being a "second- (or ninth-) story" man.

>>... There'd be no reward from Stencil because there's no honor among
>>     second- (or ninth-) story men. Because Stencil was more a bum than
>      he. (390.7)
>>[snip] But on a reflexive level the quip that there's "no honor among
>>second- (or ninth-) story men" relates to the way that Pynchon's postmodern
>>fictions are constructed, how ideas and stories are "stolen" from prior
>>sources.

best



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