MDMD: Outlaws revisited

[Terrance]

> Paul Nightingale wrote:
> 
> 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'm not sure that I would attribute that "whichever" to P's
impatience with 
fact-obsessed readers or even with the historian who holds
to such unproblematic
views of facts and history. I' m going to argue that P is
not Wicks and that he does not share Wick's view of history
and facts. Pynchon, it seems to me, is the man projecting
the projector. I read the "whichever(S)" as facts of history
that Pynchon includes in the fiction not because he wants to
write a postmodernist text or make a statement about the
problematics of history or because he wants to have all
straight line, fixed, complete, closed, so on and
postmodernism, but because he is a kind of "fact-obsessive"
who writes fictions for those who are also. In the pursuit
of the facts we will discover
the histories of "wounds bodily and ghostly, great and
small...not everyone commemorated, nor, too often, even
recounted."   


> 
> 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? 

First, from what seems to be a traditional omniscient
narrator, we learn that the nation is bickering itself into
fragments, that the times are as impossible to calculate,
this advent, as the distance to a star, that the frozen city
might almost be an island upon the ocean, and that there is
a warm and pleasant home setting and that in that setting it
has become the habit for the children and whatever friends
may happen by, to listen to tales from the far-traveled
Wicks. We learn that there is some unspoken agreement that
tolerates the presence of Wicks, who came to attend Mason's
funeral but missed it and has lingered, so long as he amuses
the children. We are told that Wicks has humored them with
tales of adventure and the like. And it seems as though the
children are the immediate and predominant audience and that
Wicks, although he doesn't consult his young audience on
this, selects and tells tales he deems appropriate to the
moral development of his young audience.  The kids bring him
some coffee. This should speed up the mind of old Wicks and
keep him from falling asleep whilst telling his tales. The
kids want a tale about America. Strange, but Wicks, so full
of American tales, has neglected the subject. The kids want
Indians and French. 
So the children, the audience, has a role not unlike the
role of the audience in Shakespeare's plays and to take it
one step further, not unlike Shakespeare's actors who play
and direct plays with in his plays. The fact that the kids
not only ask for a tale about a specific subject (America)
and make demands about who shall be in the tale (Indians and
French), but also attempt to undermine the moral usefulness
of it, interrupt and modify the "facts" in the tale when
they suspect Wicks of embroideries too grandiose (Tenebrae's
objection to the Tower), and will even
well, that would be a
spoiler, but think of Melville again and also Chaucer.  

Wicks begins by trying to remember who was there in 66. 

And next, Wicks qualifies or we could say disqualifies his
tale telling. 

This goes on and on. This is Pynchon at his best, but I
think it is very important to pay attention to the facts of
history, even as these are subverted by postmodern
techniques and even by what appears to be the applied
author's attitude toward history and fiction.