MDDMD: Dreaming in Kansas?

[jbor]

on 9/21/01 8:45 AM, Paul Nightingale at paulngale at supanet.com wrote:

> When I first read this chapter I wondered - thinking of a realist scene of
> street theatre - if the Dog might be a costumed human being engaged; I
> suspect this is still possible as an interpretation.

It strikes me that the opening chapter is "realist" while the third chapter
is "fabulist", the letters of introduction between M & D marking this abrupt
transition from the narrative "present" to an unreliable and admittedly
subjective "memory", a memory owned by one who is self-consciously under
some pressure to tweak the tales which emanate therefrom so that they
straddle a rather wide rift between titillation and instruction and thus
wander ever further from "Truth". But leaving Wicks to one side for a
moment, and I think in this novel we often have to or can afford to at
least, in the intermingling of the two distinct narrative threads which
follows it is *American* history, though through the lens of a fictional
Philadelphia hearthroom in winter, which is presented as a much more
credible pageant than the tale of talking dogs, barroom witches and
spontaneous dittying that the "factual" story of *British* society and
expedition some years earlier has been worked up into. I baulk at this a
little. Pynchon parades his research into the "factual", the "historical",
the documentary, both Stateside and British; his are purportedly and
uncontestedly "encyclopedic" fictions; the turmoil (and tyranny) of
"democracy" and "progress" in either sovereignty is alluded to and satirised
often; neither the one time and place nor the other is any more familiar or
accessible to contemporary experience; yet the juxtaposition of the one
culture and society against the other (and others) tends, invariably and
from the American perspective in which Pynchon has located his text, to work
always to the detriment of "the Other". (Unlike _GR_ I might also add.)

best