Pynchon Notes 44-45

[Dave Monroe]

>From Carol Scahechterle Loranger, ""His Kipling
Period': Bakhtinian Reflections on Annotation,
Heteroglossia and Terrorism in the Pynchon Trade,"
Pynchon Notes 44-45 (Spring-Fall 1999 [!]): 155-68 ...

   "While not a dismal science, annotation is at best
an inexact one--especially when applied to a text as
polymathically perverse as Gravity's Rainbow.  Like
other readers, annotators are burdened by their own
plots, their 'terministic screens,' as Kenneth Burke
would have it, as well as by the chimeric nature of
their archaeologies: the haphazardly attained,
hermetical cultural literacy of another human being. 
One is not surprised that information not tending
directly to support the annotator's thesis
occasionally slips through the cracks or that the
annotator might stop looking when he or she seems to
have found an adequate source...." (p. 155)

   "A more significant social-critical problem,
annotation as terrorism, is implied in the accuracy
problem sketched above.  The annotator's desire to
nail down a fact, a source, a meaning has the ripple
effect of establishing two Authoritative discourses--I
am using the phrase in its Bakhtinian sense of the
'fully complete' utterance which 'demands our
unconditional silence' (343)--where none should be. 
First, in demonstrating how the verifiables interlock
neatly to support the novelist's overarching design,
the annotator must work from the premise that the
novel is a single monologic phrase, fully under the
author's control....  Second, the annotation performs
as an executive arm of that Authority, closing off,
via the power invested in it by its promise of
accuracy, the way into 'interanimating relationships
with new [ideological] contexts'--the life-giving
'struggle' among competing verbal formations and the
self--opened by the fundamental condition of the
novel: heteroglossia (346)." (pp. 155-6)

Citing ...

Bakhtin, Mikhail.  The Dialogic Imagination:
   Four Essays.  Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael
   Holquist.  Ed. Michael Holquist.  Austin:
   U of Texas P, 1981.

These, by the way, are more or less my quibbles with
Charles Hollander's virtuoso annotations as well.  I'm
sure l'affaire Varo/Varro came to mind for more than a
few here ...

But hereafter, Loranger for several pages provides a
correction to Steven Weisenburger's (A Gravity's
Rainbow Companion [Athens: U of Georgia P, 1988])
annotation of a reference to Pirate Prentice's
"Kipling period" and an attendant reference to "Cary
Grant larking in and out slipping elephant medicine in
the punchbowls" which really should have been obvious
to anyone who's seen either film in question (Gunga
Din, Monkey Business; see Weisenburger, pp. 13, 21),
but Loranger's twist is to play out several possible
further allusions/implications/readings here (in a way
I imagine might much appeal to the aforementioned Mr.
[?] Hollander), but I'm more immediately interested in
her more general argument here, so, to continue ...

"I began by arguing that the annoitation of so rich a
text as GR must be accompanied by a reflexive
appreciation of Bakhtin's principles of dialogism. 
Finding the referent for a phrase cannot be in and of
itself any more than finding a phone number is. 
Second, the referent opens the text not simply to one
competing or assenting utterance but, potentially, to
all utterances in some way attached to it.  The better
analogy is not a single  phone number but a party line
or, for the youngsters, an internet chatroom.  Third,
while GR's generally left, ant-imperialist tendencies
are not counters by every competing utterance
introduced by an allusive passage ... and are, indeed,
boltsered by the political contexts of its 1973
publication, the text's extension of its rejection of
Authority even to its narrative voice, and its
commitment to a modernist aesthetic of detachment
effectively neuutralize the central narrative voice. 
According to Bakhtin, the dialogizing foreground
requires some background--'the works ... in their
enetirety, taken as utterances of their author'
(349)--against which to operate....  it is difficult
to say where in the novel one might find an utterance
that can be taken purely as that of the author...."
(pp. 163-4)

Which, by the way, is why I'm not much of one to
provide too much interpretive context--or even
cohesion--for my own annotations, trying, at least, to
keep them open-ended, available for use, so feel free
(all I ask is a kindly acknowledgment, is all) ... but
I obviously do have my own "terministic screens" as
well, so ...

There is a rather cranky response by Weisenburger, and
a counter-response from Loranger, both of which are
fairly predictable but worth taking into account
nonetheless (Loranger's admitted mistake was making
her sole example Weisenburger, though it was a
profitable example), but niether Weisemburger's
Companion nor Loranger's essay sufferes any fatal or
even incapaciting injury as a result, so ... but i
will leave you with this bit from Loranger, as a
teaser of sorts.  To continue ...

"The 'author' of GR is better at hiding than even
Thomas Pynchon for the simple reason that the 'author'
is a man without qualities.
   "Well, almost.  One final set of discursive
struggles ... points to an enwrapping heterosexual
discourse which extends palpably if invisibly to
Pynchon's works in their enetirety....  Heterosexual
monologism in GR and elsewhere determines one quality
of teh author as well as indicating the generational
limits of Pynchon's liberalism...." (p. 164)

The issue also contains "'Hi! My Name is Arnold
Snarb!': Homosexuality in The Crying of Lot 49" by
Mark D. Hawthorne (pp. 65-81).  And see also ...

Miller, Stephen Paul.  The Seventies Now:
   Culture as Surveillance.  Durham, NC:
   Duke UP, 1999.

Which, interestingly enough, discusses to some extent
Gravity's Rainbow in the context of the emergent 
post-Stonewall Gay Rights movement ...





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