MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Doug Millison" <pynchonoid at yahoo.com>
To: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Tuesday, August 06, 2002 5:12 PM


> At 6:33 PM +1100 8/6/02, jbor wrote:
> >doug:
> >> (something that Pynchon doesn't seem to say,
> either),
> >> but why the need to explain it that way, it seems a
> >> tad cumbersome, rather more elegant to give Wicks
> the
> >> honors and honor the author's conceit.
> >
> >And what would that conceit be, I wonder?
>
>
> Doug:
> That Wicks is telling the story, but at the same time
> that Pynchon knows that the reader knows that it's
> Pynchon telling the story -- P has anticipated all of
> your fancy narratological-analytic footwork and
> remains several steps ahead of any reader/critic.
>

I wouldn't call that fancy, Doug, and to be a little bit nasty, it's
unlikely that TRP has "anticipated" especially Robert's analysis. He's just
following his programme.

fancy: something imagined, vague opinion or belief
conceit: too high opinion of, too much pride in, oneself or one's abilities
cumbersome: heavy and awkward to carry
(just to make sure to get it right)

The question who's telling here is really interesting. The ordinary reader
may know that it's all Pynchon who is telling the story, but the critic
cannot be content with that knowledge.

On p. 647.34-35 Mason "complains to the Rev'd" that the Indians are making
him nervous -- a clue that it's not Wicks telling here but the narrator who
opens the book? But the used tense here is present, not past or past perfect
as at the beginning of the book or of Chapter Three where Wicks really takes
over ("I was not there when they met").

The narrator is not TRP, who's not sitting here with me reading the book
he's written. In my opinion Pynchon is playing (it's really a game) with
Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault (and, given all those introduced
characters who have a story to tell, with Tzvetan Todorov too, plus always a
little Brechtian alienation). You simply may enjoy a great novel, a
fantastic tale, the anecdotes, that's absolutely ok, but to me TRP is highly
discursive literature. "several steps ahead of any reader/critic" -- what
would be the reason for this confusion?

"Who is speaking thus? (...) We shall never know, for the good reason that
writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin. Writing
is that neutral, composite, oblique space where our subject slips away, the
negative where all identity is lost, starting with the very identity of the
body writing. No doubt it has always been that way. As soon as a fact is
*narrated* (italics) no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but
intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than
that of the very practice of the symbol itself, the disconnection occurs,
the voice looses is origin, the author enters into his own death, writing
begins. (...) The author is a modern figure, a product of our own society
insofar as, emerging from the Middle Ages with English empiricism, French
rationalism and the personal faith of the Reformation, it discovered the
prestige of the individual, of, as it is more nobly put, the 'human person'.
It is thus logical that in literature it should be this positivism, the
epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology, which has attached the
greatest importance to the 'person' of the author. The *author* still reigns
in histories of literature, biographies of writers, interviews, magazines,
as in the very consciousness of men of letters anxious to unite their person
and their work through diaries and memoirs. The image of literature to be
found in ordinary culture is tyrannically centred on the author, his person,
his life, his tastes, his passions, while criticism still consists for the
most part in saying that Baudelaire's work is the failure of Baudelaire the
man, Van Gogh's his madness, Tchaikovsky's his vice. The *explanation* of a
work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were
always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the
fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us. (...)
Having buried the author, the modern scriptor can thus no longer believe, as
according to the pathetic view of his predecessors, (...) For him, on the
contrary, the hand, cut off from any voice, borne by a pure gesture of
inscription (and not of expression), traces a field without origin--or
which, at least, has no other origin than language itself, language which
ceaselessly calls into question all origins. We know now that a text is not
a line of words releasing a single 'theological' meaning (the 'message' of
the Author-God) but a multi-dimensional space in which a variety of
writings, none of them original, blend and clash. The text is a tissue of
quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture. (...) Once the
Author is removed, the claim to decipher a text becomes quite futile. To
give a text an Author is to impose a limit on that text, to furnish it with
a final signified, to close the writing. (...) In the multiplicity of
writing, everything is to be *disentangled*, nothing *deciphered*; the
structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every
point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath (...) In precisely
this way literature (it would be better from now on to say *writing*), by
refusing to assign a *secret*, an ultimate meaning, to the text (and to the
world as text), liberates what may be called an anti-theological activity,
an activity that is truly revolutionary since to refuse to fix meaning is,
in the end, to refuse God and his hypostases--reason, science, law."
(Roland Barthes, The Death of the Author, quoted from David Lodge, "Modern
Criticism and Theory", Longman, London and New York, 1988, pp. 167-171)

Otto
Ceci n'est pas une pipe
http://www.uwrf.edu/history/prints/magritte-pipe.html
(someone else just showed me that -- behind every great man there's a great
woman)

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