GR 'Streets'(was ...

[Terrance]

s~Z wrote:
> 
> >>>I don't think the text embraces what the
> chaplains were preaching at all.<<<
> 
> I agree. I don't see the text embracing anything. Simply describing. In a
> way that captures the gravity of the situation.

It's one thing to assert that the Text (I'm not sure what you all mean
by "Text" but for my purposes "Text" equals "implied author) doesn't
embrace anything (GR is neutral) and quite another to assert that the
Test embraces nothing or nothingness (GR is Existential). Both readings
of GR have been discussed at some length in the critical studies of GR
and Pynchon. I happen to disagree with both of these readings of GR and
Pynchon. 

To return to the context: 

Again, while I'm quite convinced that the army-chaplain is NOT talking
about "nothingness" in the Sartrean sense, a discussion of Sartre's
theories of narrative neutrality is still dangling from the tip of my
tongue and waiting with baited breath. Since the term "nothingness" in
the army-chaplain's sermon has proven to be consistent with what a man
of the cloth would be talking about in the Christian sense and not in
the Existential sense, if one wants to argue that Existential
"nothingness" is implied (ironically or otherwise) one would need to
attribute this implied meaning to someone other than the army-chaplain.
Can we attribute it to a narrator,  Text or the implied author (Booth),
the author? There are several examples of omniscient commentary in GR. I
think that we can easily identify the implied author of GR and we can
determine his attitudes, opinions, ideas and so on. Sartre claims that
the author must not only avoid kinds of omniscient commentary common in
GR and  sit above and beyond like a God paring his fingernails (Joyce),
he must give the illusion that he does not even exist. According to
Sartre, if we suspect, for even a moment, that there is a man behind the
curtain, a director off stage and behind the scenes, (can't help but
toss Rilke in here) a puppeteer pulling the strings (1), that the author
has violated the laws governing fictional beings because the characters
no longer appear to be free. For Sartre, in the  novel of unmediated
reality, the novelist must be either a witness of character action or
their accomplice, but never both at the same time. The novelist must be
either inside or out. If you recognize this kind of lit-crit it because
most of the stuff Sartre advocates (much of it is truly absurd) is the
stuff that Postmodernist interpretations accept as the rules of
postmodern fiction making. For example, the author should not even
suggest an ordered world, either one in which he lives or of which he
remembers events. The fiction itself is an event and not a product or
made fiction. This is because not only must the characters be free of
the pulleys and stage directions, the reader too must be free to
confront the absurdity of chaos. No order, no absolute. The problem for
Sartre, with a novelist like Joyce or Pynchon, is Pride. Is that a
deadly sin? Yes, in Sartre's view it is deadly sin. but a deadly sin of
a kind our  army-chaplain would never even contemplate let alone preach
to a congregation of men headed into the jaws of death, the arms of god.
Salvation and Redemption may not be available to those who deny Christ,
but in Sartre's formula, it is the denial of the complete  relativity of
values that is Pride, a deadly sin.