SLSL It's raining Frogs & Mirrors

Tue Dec 10 10:31:58 CST 2002

So what is the authentic instrument to be used by the
reader? It is the impersonal imagination and artistic
delight. What should be established, I think, is an
artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind
and the author's mind. We ought to remain a little
aloof and take pleasure in this aloofness while at the
same time we keenly enjoy-passionately enjoy, enjoy
the tears and shivers-the inner weave of a given
masterpiece. To be quite objective in these matters is
of course impossible. For instance, you sitting there
may be merely my dream, and I may be your nightmare.
But what I mean is that the reader must know when and
where to curb his imagination and this he does by
trying to get clear the specific world the author
places at his disposal. We must see things and here
things; we must visualize the rooms, the clothes, and
the manners of the author's people. The color of Fanny
Price's eyes in Mansfield Park and the furnishing of
her cold little room are important.  
We all have different temperaments, and I can tell you
right now that the best temperament for a reader to
have, or to develop, is a combination of the artistic
and the scientific one. The enthusiastic artist alone
is apt to be too subjective in his attitude toward a
book, and so a scientific coolness of judgement will
temper the intuitive heat. If, however, a would-be
reader is utterly devoid of passion and patience-of an
artist's passion and a scientific patience-he will
hardly enjoy great literature. 

Nabokov, _Lectures On Literature_, Edited by Fredson
Bowers, Introduction by John Updike, Harcourt Brase,
1980, "Good Readers and Writers" 

Curb his imagination? Get clear the specific world the
author places at his disposal? 

What happens in a world under erasure? 
What happens when the text deliberately opens the
flood gates of the reader's imagination? 

While I suspect that McHale's ontological approach
defines postmodernist texts rather than the texts
themselves, it is worth looking at his use of
Pynchon's texts to make his case about postmodernist
construction.  More importantly, McHale argues that
text processing, in other words THE DEAR READER
reading a book,  and not the poet or author organizing
his work
is where we need to focus in order to understand
theses texts. 

Thus, the Modernism - even if it is only
mock-Modernism - of Pynchon's earlier fiction gives
one a priori some reason to think that the
investigation of Modernist aspects of Gravity's
Rainbow should be fruitful. But how are we to
formulate the Modernist model of fiction so as to
bring into sharpest focus the relation between this
model and our allegedly postmodernist text? This
relation emerges most clearly when we concentrate not
on formal textual organization as such but on
text-processing, the pattern-making and
pattern-interpreting behavior which the text's formal
organization elicits from the reader. Concentration on
text- processing is particularly appropriate where
modernist fiction is concerned, for one of modernism's
fundamental characteristics is the relatively expanded
function of the reader; or shall we say, the
apparently new and expanded repertoire of operations
which the reader is expected to undertake. 

If there is something comforting - religious, if you
want - about paranoia, there is still also
anti-paranoia, where nothing is connected to anything,
a condition not many of us can bear for long (GR:434).

Pynchon's reader has every right to feel conned,
bullied, betrayed. Indeed, these responses are the
essence of the aesthetic effect of Gravity's Rainbow.
The reader has been invited to undertake the
kinds of pattern-making and pattern-interpreting
operations which, in the Modernist texts with which we
have all become familiar, would produce intelligible
meaning; here, they produce almost a parody of
intelligibility. We have been confronted with
representations of mental processes of the kind which,
in Modernist texts, we could have relied upon in
reconstructing external (fictive) reality. In
Gravity's Rainbow, such representations are always
liable to be qualified retroactively as dream,
fantasy, or hallucination, while the reconstructions
based upon them are always subject to contradiction or
cancellation. The ultimate effect is radically to
destabilize novelistic ontology. Similarly, the reader
has been invited to motivate transitions among
sequences of minds in a way which obviously relates to
the Modernist device of transition by "triangulation",
only to find himself led into increasingly bizarre and
increasingly unstable "occult" transitions. Elusive
modes of intelligibility and, if that weren't enough,
unacceptable or distressing types of content -
pornography, broad slap-stick comedy, technical
scientific material, etc. -one might well wonder,
along with the Pulitzer committee that rejected
Gravity's Rainbow, what to make of it all.

Or perhaps the question should be not so much what to
make of it, as what it makes of one. For the effect of
this troublesome novel is, finally, the salutary one
of disrupting the conditioned responses of the
Modernist reader (and we are all, still, Modernist
readers), of de-conditioning the reader. It is the
same effect, no doubt, as Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and
The Sound and the Fury had on their first readers.
Pynchon at one point quotes Pavlov's remarks about the
extinction of a conditioned reflex "beyond the point
of reducing a reflex to zero," "a silent extinction
beyond the zero" (84-85). The readerly equivalent of
this-conditioning "beyond the zero" is that state in
which "nothing is connected to anything" which Pynchon
calls anti-paranoia. It is an instructive, perhaps
even hygenic, state to be in for a time, even though
it is, as Pynchon goes on to say, "a condition not
many of us can bear for long" (GR:434). My use of the
metaphors of paranoia and anti-paranoia for our habits
of reading and the damage which Gravity's Rainbow does
them may seem extravagant, but it is not wholly
unadvised. As one of Pynchon's critics has
penetratingly remarked, the frame of mind in which one
is required to read
Modernist fiction, the mind-set of tout se tient,
might aptly be characterized as paranoiac. Paranoia,
it seems,  

"is the condition under which most of modern
literature comes to life: the author relies on the
reader to find correspondences between names, colors,
or the physical attributes of characters and other
invisible qualities of those characters, places, and
actions, while to do so in "real life" would clearly
be an indication of paranoid behavior." 
 (Siegel 1976:50).

Pynchon's text sets itself against this Modernist
mind-set, chiefly by luring the paranoid reader - the
Modernist reader - into interpretative dark alleys,
cul-de-sacs, impossible situations, and requiring him
to find his way out by some other path than the one he
came in by. 

Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow holds the mirror up
not so much to Nature as to Reading." 

McHale, Brian, _Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge,
1992. 

In other words, according to McHale, Pynchon has
turned the Classical and NeoClassical mirror of
"reality" on the reader. Has Pynchon turned the
mirror?  Has the mirror turned in the hands of the
critics? The Classical critic had no interest in the
poet's personality, his motives for writing, and the
process by which he produced his work. What was
reflected in that classical mirror? That Classical
mirror held the image (debated) of a universe of
orderly and permanent forms. When these orderly and
permanent forms were questioned and confidence in
their "reality" waned,  the mirror was turned on the
poet. Foucault's question about authorship could only
become an inquiry in the first place if critics were
interested in authorship. Turn the mirror away from
the work and "reality" reflected and  ignore the
author and the only one left, is the dear reader. If
Pynchon turns the mirror on reading, on text
processing, on the dear reader, can he be following
Nabokov's advice to good readers and good writers?
Nabokov also seems to turn the mirror on the reader
from time to time in his fictions. Does he? Has Mchale
got this right? Does Pynchon turn the mirror away from
reality and hold it up to reading? Or does the critic
turn the mirror on the reader because he has nothing
left to hold it up to? 

Bill

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