MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[Otto]

----- Original Message -----
From: "Terrance" <lycidas2 at earthlink.net>
To: "Otto" <ottosell at yahoo.de>
Cc: "Pynchon-L" <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Wednesday, August 07, 2002 1:08 AM
Subject: Re: MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"
>
>
> Otto wrote:
> >
> > 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").
>
>
> Of course the RC could still be telling the tale at this point in the
> chapter. He could be the narrator for the entire chapter, perhaps
> referring to himself in third person, sort of like Stencil. Although
> this particular example and others are not like the third person
> narratives of Stencil or Henry Adams. Stencil often says things like,
> "Stencil doesn't want to go to Malta."  Adams says things like, "Adams
> realized that education doesn't go on forever." But neither, I think,
> uses the second person dialogue marker included in your example ("to the
> Revd" or see 648.8 "says the Revd). Do they?
>
> At the end of Chapter 8 in V. we learn that Stencil is told about
> Mondaugan's adventures in SWA. The entire tale, including a few
> questions takes only 30 minutes to convey, but as the next Chapter
> (Mondaugen's Story) is very long because it has been Stencilized.
> It has been lengthened and added to. By Stencil? That's the implication,
> but  the tale doesn't really read like a tale told by Stencil at all,
> but by another narrator closer to the author.
>
> It's possible that the RC tells the entire tale, but this sort of
> reading reminds me of the critic that read GR in its entirety as
> Pirate's dream.
>

Well, in the case of GR the references to the Wizard of Oz could lead to
that view. I wouldn't reject this although I don't believe that it's meant
that way.

> There is no question but that we have several narrators in this novel.
> Some of the episodes are Stencilized by the RC, that is the RC has heard
> the tale or has some notes on or about the tale or a Journal whatever,
> but when he begins telling it, the tale is expounded, compounded,
> rounded, abounded, and Stencilized. Early on in the narrative the  RC
> gets caught in the act of tall-tale telling and even exaggerating his
> own exploits.
>

Yes, Stencilization is the beginning.

> At 649 we get, "and so on (records the Revd) followed by the Revd's
> comment that
> "**IF** I did lose consciousness now and then..." and a dream that he
> had in which he seems to have been not completely asleep, it being the
> first dream he can remember wherein he smelled things (that Mark Twain,
> Mr. T Stuff you know).
>
> Anyway, P has deliberately mixed up the narrative and introduced all
> manner of ambiguity. Call it postmodern if you like, although even Brian
> McHale admits that V. is not a postmodern novel and it has most of same
> narrative stuff. So, as many a critic has pointed out do the novels of
> Melville. In fact, the RC's disappearance and the staging of episodes
> (this is also a feature of the novel V.) is nothing new under the
> American sun.
>

Only the American sun? Isn't that provincialism? Meanwhile I think that
postmodernism is the post-WWII branch of modernism. What do you think of the
Barthes-quote I posted, applied to Pynchon in general? Especially the last
sentence, because I was thinking of you when I typed it last night:

"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."

>
> In any event, I think it is clear that once the dagga is introduced at
> 655, our fantastik narrator has taken over. There is a pattern to P's
> narratives that ends with the fantastic.
>
> The guy that nails all this is not Brian McHale, but
>
>               A Hand to Turn the Time: The Menippean Satires of Thomas
> Pynchon
>               Theodore D. Kharpertian / Hardcover / Published 1990

I could never lay my hands on this, so if someone could send me the
following I'd be very grateful:

Kharpertian, Theodore D. "Of Models, Muddles, and Middles: Menippean Satire
and Pynchon's V." Pynchon Notes 17 (1985): 3-14.

additional:
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/review_essays/swans55.htm

Otto

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