MDDM Ch. 70 Higher Assembly

[Terrance]

jbor wrote:
> 
> on 19/8/02 9:56 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:
> 
> > To say that the story is narrated first or third person is to say very
> > little unless we say something about what effects "person" has on the
> > narrative.
> >
> > The same goes for time or tense--past or present or subjunctive ( we
> > have various forms of what may be called the subjunctive in this novel,
> > including the "IF" narratives. The "IF" narratives can be long, taking
> > up half a chapter or more. Sometimes they are only brief asides or
> > comments that inform us that the dialogue we are reading is what the
> > characters would have said IF they had this conversation.
> >
> > It's the effects that matter.
> 
> I think this is just semantics. 
>I agree that, just as we can itemise
> specific denotations and connotations of various words and references in the
> texts, we can identify person, tense and so forth. But these grammatical
> features don't operate in isolation from other textual elements, and are
> often indeterminate themselves, as the narrative vantage sometimes seems to
> shift in the space of a sentence or even a phrase or single word. 

Call it semantics but you are agreeing with my point so....but I didn't
make myself clear. See below 



I think
> saying that the author intended this or that "effect", or that the text has
> this or that "effect" on the reader, are still ways of trying to lay claim
> to an all-encompassing interpretation of the text.

Not necessarily and this is certainly not what we find in the critical
literature, be it about Pynchon's books or Joyce's or
Melvilles.....etc....

Example, Critics often begin a reading of Melville's C-M  admitting that
they are not trying to lay claim to an all encompassing interpretation,
that no such reading exists, is possible, desirable, but admitting this
does not undermine their efforts to discover and describe the effects
narrative elements have on the reader and/or why the author employs
them. In fact, knowing you have read McHale, this is exactly how he
reads Pynchon and modern/postmodernist fiction. 

> 
> By the way. I also thought that Doug's argument was that "Wicks is telling
> the story", and that we should "give Wicks the honors and honor the author's
> conceit". But, and as I think you noted, there's no rule against changing
> one's mind.
> 
> best


"All things must change."

	- George