MDDM: ch. 67 "Garden Pests"

[jbor]

Otto wrote:

> Yes, Stencilization is the beginning.

Yes, even in _V._ there is another narrative agency which is filtering
Stencil's "versions" and acute self-consciousness even within those sections
of the narrative which are ostensibly narrated by him. Eg:

    It would be simple in Rusty Spoon-talk to call him contemporary man in
    search of an identity. Many of them had already decided that was his
    Problem. The only trouble was that Stencil had all the identities he
    could cope with conveniently right at the moment: he was quite purely He
    Who Looks For V. (and whatever impersonations that might involve), and
    she was no more his own identity than Eigenvalue the soul-dentist or any
    other member of the Crew. (_V._ 226)

It's typical of the narratological indeterminacy of postmodernist fiction.
This particular passage could be Stencil's train of thought, or it could be
another narrator representing Stencil's train of thought, or detached
commentary on the way Stencil is perceived by others. There's no way to know
for sure because it's characteristic of Pynchon's texts that the narrative
point of view will shift without warning. The way Stencil mucks around with
pronouns (referring to himself in the third person) pre-empts the ubiquitous
"you" (and, in a different way, the "They") in _GR_. And, the indeterminacy
of who is actually "telling" the "story" in the passage above is reinforced
or compounded overtly in the text by the contradiction between the conceit
that the characters and events are merely Stencilized, or "impersonations",
and the statement that the characters are in fact not "his own identity" at
all, but have a separate and material existence.

It is quite similar to the way that Wicks both is and isn't the narrator in
_M&D_. It's a literary contrivance of Pynchon's. One strategy which works
quite well in deconstructing Pynchon's work is to leave the narrating
persona to one side at first, but factor it in by undertaking a sort of
"double reading" of the text.

best