MDDM Ch. 76 ..a sort of Shadow ever in the Room [747.27]

[jbor]

Otto wrote:

> Exactly -- maybe because we have grown up with a whole bunch of literature
> claiming to tell us once and for all how the world is about, but realized
> that these images were just images, and not even original ones, but only
> versions of versions of versions, re-told and re-cycled forever. Robert has
> posted two interesting urls on this recently.

And I can't get away from the feeling that for all their literary-linguistic
pyrotechnics the Modernists still positioned themselves as what Barthes
would call "author-Gods" vis à vis "the" text and the interpretation of
"the" text, which is something I don't think Pynchon and other exponents of
postmodernism ever do, or, at least, not without an awareness of the
inherent problematics in the supposed contract which exists between writer
and reader.

I think the foregrounding of the constructed nature of the narrative is
explicit throughout the text, and it occurs most overtly in the ongoing
debate between Wicks and Ives about the "truth" quotient of the various
details in the stories. If the reader hasn't picked up on all the hints in
this framing discussion, as well as on the conspicuous inconsistencies which
are present in the telling of the tales themselves, by Chapter 76 of the
novel, then the late introduction of Boswell and Dr. Johnson isn't going to
make a jot of difference. The scene is a part of that whole dialectic about
truth and history (as Ives contests whether the meeting ever actually took
place at 744.4), but I think the danger in reducing it to *only* that is
that its overt significances become suppressed, and in particular the
characterisations and presented attitudes of the particular players therein.

best