What are these people about?

[jbor]

on 6/3/02 6:41 AM, Terrance at lycidas2 at earthlink.net wrote:

> Agreed, not in very good taste.  But, the question of honesty is quite a
> different matter as regards RC. Isn't it? He's the narrator and
> tall-tale teller. He is the Ishmael of this tale. Mason tells Dixon to
> go to the site  as a Harlequin, but we've got one of those in RC  who
> is looking back at his youth and playing several parts in the drama he
> both constructs and performs. He will even go so far as to step off the
> stage and address a particular member or generation of the audience.
> Remember, he was not there. Furthermore, I think it is not unreasonable
> to read both Mason's reaction and Dixon's reaction as RC's projections
> or to take it one step further, to read Dixon and Mason as projections
> of RC.  Since the field book says Mason went alone and since it is
> pretty clear that it is RC who decides that *they* (Jere and Charlie)
> in fact went together, they entire tale is yarn RC spins, including his
> own foolish role.

I take your point but I think there are times when the narrative -
ostensibly within Wicks's tales - shifts totally out of his ken, and that
it's a bit of a cop-out to say that M & D and their responses and
realisations at this or that point in the text are only "projections" of
Wicks's and thus dismiss them. (After all, Wicks is only a "projection" of
Pynchon's in the first place. And there are examples aplenty of the shift
*beyond* Wicks - an obvious recent one would be when the narrative relates
events in R.C.'s life at home with Phoebe *after* the time of the
expedition, and quite probably after the time of Wicks's tale-telling as
well, at 324-5.) And we've agreed to disagree about Wicks correlation to
Ishmael I think. 

My point is that there are themes and realisations in the text which are at
odds with (the tale-telling) Wicks's viewpoint. Certainly Wicks
characterises "young Cherrycoke" within his narratives, and often harshly or
comically, and he's not a totally unsympathetic character at all. However, I
don't think he speaks for the text (in the same way that Ishmael does, for
example). In this instance I can completely understand why Dixon could not
and did not pray at the site of the massacre. How inappropriate would it
have been for him to pray to the slaughterers' "God" for the "souls" of the
slaughtered? I don't think Wicks gets this at all. And no wonder Dixon's own
faith was shaken to the core at that moment. I think that these are things
which Wicks does not realise, even as an older man, complacent and certain
in his own faith, but which the text does take for granted.

best