lit crit bull shit

[Joachim de Fiore]

Thomas Eckhardt wrote:

 
> I have not defined anything. Novels with an utterly transparent implied author can
> be masterpieces whereas novels with shifting PsOV, various equally trustworthy
> narrators etc. can be boring as hell.

My opinion is that (see Moore's *The Style of Connectedness*
page. 41-5, Booth) 

to write about Pynchon's books requires that one quote much
more liberally from TRP's own texts than is the usual
practice in literary criticism. ANyone that has read a few
books of criticism knows that critics often apologies for
long quotes. With Pynchon we see longer ones. SOmetimes this
is owed to the fact that Pynchon, like Joyce, has a habit
of  constructing sentences that run from river to sea. And,
although not a practical 
solution to our definition/term/theoretical/critical not to
mention
the language/culture/international/audiance on Pynchon-L, it
can help, I swear. 
It also requires an independence that is not fashionable and
perhaps not
consistent with what is often required to conform with the
rules of literary criticism. How many articles have taken up
entropy and the Paranoid/ Anti-Paranoid critical stance to a
fault? How many critics (McHale leads the pack) equate the
reader with GR characters or TRP and characters. And then
there is 
the problem of the "reader the text and the poem" or the
Mirror. (I think we can identify the "implied author" in P's
texts and I think we can so it here in V. I't's very tough,
but the Epilogue and Fausto is where I would start)  The
text is a mirror held up to what? Maybe it's not a mirror?
It's some sort of transaction? In any event, there is, at
least in the experimental postmodernist fiction of Thomas
Pynchon, parameters set by the text itself. 
This is not to say that Otto is not correct to say, wait
just a minute, you are not going to get all new critical and
modern professor at the podium (and all the poltics of
meaning and "truth" and so on) on me. But we have a text and
we know that it was written by Thomas R. Pynchon. It is not
only black marks on a page until a reader gives it his/her
meaning. In the interest of, if nothing else, the cumulative
sharing of culture, we may  justify the concern for accurate
replication of the texts as they were conceived by their
authors. The problem of eliciting meaning from texts and
propaganda analysis both in Nazi-dominated media and the
U.S. dominated media is significant concern of TRP's work.
In  post war, post-Sputnik era,  intellectualism fostered
the
extraordinary dominance of the New Critics both in
Universities and Critical circles. TRP's response is a
balanced response, his novels and essays show remarkable
balance. He does not get caught, as his critics do, it being
their business not his, in the pendulum swing
disillusionment with the New-Critics that attempted to give
the reader  his/her freedom by killing the author. Sure,
both/and, but
Moby-Dick is not a tale told by idiot about a little girl
that feel down a rabbits hole with her cousin Hamlet.

 

The biggest problem is the enormity and complexity of the
texts. 
Critics usually take up one aspect of the text--religion or
film-- and
develop an essay that cannot possibly address the
multiplicies, contradictions, ambiguities present in the
text. So, what we often hear is that it is Indeterminate by
design. 
 How else can they account for the vast number of mutually
incompatible interpretations?
It's the blind men's elephant or better still,  the blind
men's elephant held up to a mirror? To do justice to the
text's multifariousness, when addressing a
particular passage or scene it is necessary to bring in all
the analogous passages, even those that contradict. This is
one of things Moore tries to do in his book. Although he
takes an entire book, 300 pages to discuss one novel--GR--I
don't think he is very sucessful. He resigns himself to the
fact that he can not hope to identify and unravel the
"applied author." This is a project in its self.  

Pynchon plays on the "paranoia" of his audience just as
Shakespeare played on his audience's desire for resolute
action. TRP is our contemporary, so we lack a certain
distance, but critics have been too mindful of
interpretative paranoia and have thus opted for a critical
stance that is often as tricky and as slippery as the books
under consideration.  
It's indeterminate, Pynchon is setting you on a quest that
has not objective. 
Reader trap! McHale's "conditioned" reader must try
but ultimately fail. But Pynchon recognizes that the quest
for meaning, for patterns, for interpretation, is not only a
basic human need, it is an affirmative "mindless
pleasure." 

McHale claims, "nearly everything is lost in the
translation. From first to last the reader's experience
proves that GR will not boil down quite so readily to
intelligible patterns of theme, or indeed to any of the
patterns which we have learned to expect from Modernist
texts." 

This claim would undermine most studies of Pynchon.  Any
study
that takes up, say, how pornography functions in GR, or
religion & politics in V., or entropy, intertextuality,
comedy,
satire, paranoia, subtext, or any part of the indeterminate
whole is a "misreading" since any partial study depends on
prior assumptions concerning the central meaning of the
literary artifact. Critics that take this position assert
that the sum of the parts cannot be compared to the
indeterminate whole or that Pynchon's books  lack a central
subject
(vehicle) or even a hierarchy of subjects and it moves from
place to place without reason or purpose. 

All attempts to reconstruct are not going to work. Why?
Because Pynchon  destabilizes, among other things, 
"novelistic
ontology." And "novelistic ontology" is an element where the
"conditioned readers" of Modernists texts generally found
their point of view. So, looking back,
with this simple way of looking at it, while the
pre-Modernist text would permit a reconstruction through
mediation of an omniscient and usually a more or less
reliable narrator, Modernism complicated reconstruction by
employing narrators with a limited point of view or even
rendering them imperceptible. What's more, unreliability was
limited to the "fictive world" and was of an
"epistemological" rather than "ontological" nature, still
allowing for the reconstruction of an external fictive
reality. McHale's argument claims that in the Modernist
novel, where several mediating consciousness were
introduced,  "triangulation," that is, the movement from one
consciousness to another through coordinates in the 'real'
visible, audible, tangible, etc. remained relatively
stable, but in GR, the narrator disorientates the  reader of
pre-Modernist texts and the "conditioned" modernist reader,
since "triangulation" in GR does not permit the
reconstruction of the "real" situation in which the contents
of one mind are accessible to another. Paradigm shift!

See "Negative capability."  

Questions:

How can a subversion of the narrative succeed without being
itself internally organized in certain ways? How can a text 
break the modernist rules without stating them implicitly?
As David Lodge sez, "if postmodernism really succeeds in
expelling the idea of order (whether expressed in metonymic
or metaphoric form) from modern writing, then it would truly
abolish itself, by destroying the norms against which we
perceive its deviation." 

Doesn't the "Counterforce" fail because it refuses  to
organize itself? 

Are P's books,  in Barthe's terms, "beyond criticism
altogether?

Beyond interpretation?

They are still books, words organized on pages, and if the
number of signifieds is potentially infinite, the number of
singnifiers is not. For interpretation to become possible,
isn't it necessary that a text provide us with some
indication as to which meanings are permitted and which may
be excluded? Now, you postmodernists will laugh at me now,
for the postmodern text does not allow for or call for
restrictions  but rather disperses
with "playfulness" or to use Barthe's terms again, replaces
"denotation with "connotation" and in fact, any formal
evaluation of features of genre (style, perspective and so
on) is not valuable, is not possible,  and
the sole distinction between relevant and irrelevant devices
is arbitrary. 

So,  I would not waste my breath,  Thomas. 
Take it form a Bastard in the know. 

But if this is the case with postmodern texts, with P's
fiction, can
a reader determine how Pynchon's narrative intricacies are
internally motivated? Are we to understand them as mimetic
reflections of the complexities of the modern or postmodern
world or as particular intellectual assumptions implicit in
the narrative? 

Turn the mirror on the writing for a moment. 

Writing, David Lodge says, "especially writing of narrative,
is a process of constant choice and decision making: to make
your hero do this rather than that, to describe the action
from this angle rather than that. How can one decide such
questions except in terms of some overall design--which is
in some sense a design upon one's putative reader."

Lodge also notes, that it is in particular comedy which
"offers most resistance to post-structualist aesthetics,"
and P is nothing if not amnerican side splitting comedy. 

How do we account for Pynchon's statement in the
Introduction to Slow Learner, that his apprentice exercises
were too top heavy with concepts and "assbackwards" in terms
of plot and character development? 

Well, we read M&D. Can't wait till September and I did get
the tapes to listen to the book, have not yet. This is the
first time I have tried to listen to novel, but I when I was
a kid I listened to poetry all the time. Ever hear Yeats
read his poetry? He would 
go hungery on the streets of Dublin.