V.V. (17) current chapter

[Otto]

Jbor:
> >
> >2) "story"/storey
> >
> >Even though it is standard US usage, I can't help but hear a pun in the
> >following passage:
> >
> >     ... 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)
> >
> >A "second-storey man" is a burglar who enters premises through an
upstairs
> >window, which fits with what Stencil and Profane are doing. And this
> >recognition that Stencil is more of a "bum" than Profane is a pretty
> >crucial
> >one I think. 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. The nesting of narratives within narratives (within a narrative)
> >typifies much of his fiction, particularly in this novel and in _M&D_,
and
> >is a defining characteristic of the postmodern genre itself. And, there
is
> >a
> >distinct sense in which Stencil, and his creator, are themselves "second-
> >(or ninth-) story men". Pynchon's foregrounding (and somewhat
> >self-deprecatory self-consciousness -- "no honor") of the way that all
> >texts
> >are always already constructed from other texts -- his own included -- is
> >another common feature within his literary mode, one which places him and
> >his work firmly into the postmodern genre I think.
>

Absolutely agreed, Robert. We can't help but stencilize if we tell.

Swing:

> Interesting that Brian McHale says that niether V. nor
> CL49 is Postmodernist, both, he maintains, are Modernist.
>

Actually McHale says: "(...) , the Modernism - even if it is only
mock-Modernism - of Pynchon's earlier fiction (...)"

> In his latest essay on Pynchon's M&D, he says, that the
> traditional historical novel is systematically
> "postmodernized" and then goes on to say that Ethelemer
> speaks for the "postmodern" in  the now famous history & fiction debate.
> Why Ethelmer? In any event, McHale, I suspect,
> has given up on the idea that Pynchon is the Postmodernist
> although he can't help but toss the
> term postmodern, always inside  quotation marks,  into his otherwise
> brilliant essay; the Nested levels and frames are now traced back to the
> classic frame-tales, The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, The Canterbury
> Tales. Now I always said that if Pynchon is a
> Postmodernist, so must be Faulkner, Joyce, Melville, Fielding,
> Swift, Chaucer....nex we will be reading that T.S. Eliot
> was a Postmodernist.
>
>

Ethelmer maybe p. 263.

"'Tis the Elder World, Turn'd Upside Down."

and/or p. 350:

"Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only in
Interest that must ever prove base."

On your argument:
You forgot Dante and Sterne in your list.

Pynchon is very different from the early Joyce, not so much from "Finnegan's
Wake". Tracing back the nested levels and frames to the original concepts is
precisely the way postmodernism works --I repeat my urge to read the
important essays in Barth's "The Friday Book"-- to show that Modernism was
an important step. But doesn't insisting on modernity, a form of art
developed around the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, necessarily mean
to neglect the experience of the 20th century, WW-I, Secularisation, WW-II,
the Holocaust, new technologies and media, the fictionalisation of reality,
new threats through bio-tech?
The Experience of the 20th Century relating back to its cultural sources --
this is Pynchon (and postmodernism) to me.

Wolfley (I got only the German version of his essay on Norman O. Brown)
writes that all of Pynchon's fiction is written in respect to T.S. Eliot's
main thesis that a fully secularized culture is absurd in itself and unable
to live.

Otto

WOLFLEY, LAWRENCE C., 1977. "Repression's Rainbow: The Presence of Norman 0.
Brown in Pynchon's Big Novel," PMLA 92, 873-889

Parabeln der Verdrängung: Thomas Pynchon und die psychoanalytische
Kulturkritik Norman O. Browns, in: Ickstadt, Heinz, (ED): Ordnung und
Entropie, Zum Romanwerk von Thomas Pynchon, Reinbek bei Hamburg, 1981, pp.
197-226