MDMD: Outlaws revisited

[Paul Nightingale]

Many thanks, Terrance, John.

Cherrycoke isn't just a storyteller, and an untrustworthy one at that (albeit less untrustworthy than some); he draws attention to the way an account is textualised. His crime of anonymity: he claims he observed something, then produced a written account, which is now revised/reproduced many years later. He then proceeds to tell a story about Mason and Dixon, and his own relationship with them: this will require the text alternating between first- and third-person narration ("Suture Self"). Here, the first-person passages cast doubt on the authority of the third-person passages, where the narrator is, by convention, somewhat aloof (if not omniscient). The first paragraph of Ch3 goes through several different layers of textualisation before it reaches the page published by Random House/Jonathon Cape (and let's not get started on the economics of publishing). When I started reading this chapter, I thought first of Conrad's Heart of Darkness, where a character at the beginning of the novel becomes the narrator. Conrad, preserves some kind of authorial sovereignty for himself, however, which (by convention) will encourage the reader to believe that the world-as-narrated is 'really there'; the emphasis in HofD is on (a) the narrator's quest for knowledge and (b) the conflicting accounts he will receive. Eventually, the account he gives of Kurtz will be deliberately falsified, which maintains the fiction that 'the truth' is possible. There is no such equivocating in Pynchon's work. This is why we can never be sure any narrator is reliable in the sense that their account will be unambiguous/unquestionable. It is not simply that Cherrycoke cannot remember where he was imprisoned; or even that he might not be entirely truthful. I think that mid-sentence "whichever" indicates his (that is to say, Pynchon's own) impatience with the kind of fact-obsessive who thinks the past can be reproduced unproblematically.

I hope this does not sound like the worst kind of (reactionary) postmodernist pessimism: we can never know something so why bother trying. Pynchon's work simply asks us to think about how we know something, how we construct meaning; what is the status of the information on which we base our understanding? To put it mildly, such questions are pretty important at the moment. But let's not get started on a President who can so easily win approval by appearing human with unscripted tears.
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