Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that

[Paul Nightingale]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Terrance [mailto:lycidas2 at earthlink.net]
> Sent: 29 April 2003 18:13
> To: Paul Nightingale
> Cc: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Subject: Re: Foreword, Churchill, Orwell, old hat and all that
> 
> 
> 
> Paul Nightingale wrote:
> >
> > One of the problems I have is dealing with the arbitrary distinction
> > between fiction and non-fiction, between the novel and politics.
> 
>  If we dismiss the distinction between fiction and non-fiction (i.e.,
> Gravity's Rainbow equals a  biology text) what the author and the text
> tell us is subordinated to what the reader says they do. GR is a work
of
> biology?  On come now, it's not. Is it an obituary? A list of
> ingredients?
> 
As you see below I do go on to emphasise the importance of narrative.
One can certainly look for narrative in the biology textbook and the
list of ingredients.
> 
> >Writing is writing.
> 
> NO. And reading is not reading. One simply does not read a novel like
GR
> in the same way that one reads the ingredients listed on the back of a
> Power Bar meal replacement package.
> 
You give the game away when you add that "in the same way". Reading is a
cultural activity and therefore learned. Readers now are more sensitive
to the listing of 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' ingredients. A pretty banal
example, but the narrative goes something like, this chocolate bar will
kill me because it's full of shit. Or: this bar of sugary gunge will
give me energy and help me run the marathon in seven minutes flat. 
> 
> If one accepts that all writing is ordered discursively,
> > then one can make connections. One can also avoid prioritising one
> > category over another (eg "crude propaganda" over "fiction" or
> > vice-versa).
> 
> One can avoid these priorities altogether, I guess. But why?
> If Guliver's Travels is a brilliant political satire and GR is a
> brilliant political satire we can compare them as such. If _1984_ is a
> political satire too, we can compare it with these others. If _1984_
is
> so weak when we set it next to GT and GR we might say that it is a
> lesser political satire or we might even say it is not a brilliant
> political
> satire but only a crude propaganda.
>
The appropriate question concerns the way in which each text orders its
narrative. In the C18th, having a guy go walkabout works a lot better
than it would now: the text is dependent on the C18th reader's ignorance
of the world. More does something similar in Utopia, of course -
inventing an island out there allows him to pretend he's not writing
about C16th England. (At which point excuse my ignorance of GP - one of
the books I've not read recently.) For the reasons I've discussed
already, the mass media are more important as features of a C20th text.
> 
> Admittedly, one responds differently as a reader to, eg, GR
> > and a newspaper report of yesterday's game. But if one accepts that
each
> > is a narrative, with telling a story its aim, then a different
series of
> > questions are raised.
> 
> Suppose I only want  to know if the Yankees won yesterday. I can read
> that "narrative" in about 3 seconds. Is this a very short story?  Not
> that
> I want to compare it with Heart Of Darkness or The Dead, but where is
> the narrative?
>
If you read it, there's a narrative. That's part of the definition of
reading. I suspect that just knowing the score becomes meaningless. In
fact, it's impossible for you to just read the score and make sense of
it without other knowledge, either in the report or brought to it by
your own culturally defined understanding. Was it a great comeback, or
did they almost throw away an unassailable lead? What about the status
of the two teams? Sports reporting uses 'literary' metaphors all the
time, eg David vs Goliath. Just as politics uses sporting metaphors: the
President, God help us, as America's (and now the world's - God help us
even more) Quarterback.

Oh yes, I almost forgot - have you ever read two different biology
textbooks and wondered why they're not the same? I mean, the subject's
the same, isn't it?