VLVL2 and NPPF: Missed Communication

[Jasper Fidget]

> From: Tim Strzechowski [mailto:dedalus204 at comcast.net]
> 
> > If missed communication can be taken as Zoyd's disconnectedness with the
> > world around him, then Kinbote becomes an easy parallel.  My sense of
> > chapter one of VL (and I haven't read it in over a decade, so this one
> > chapter I read yesterday feels fairly new to me), is of a sort of Rip
> van
> > Winkle waking up to a world that has changed while he slept, but not
> > realizing it right away (not getting the message).
> >
> > Similarly, one approach to PF is to view Kinbote (as the alias of
> Russian
> > scholar V. Botkin) as one who feels dispossessed by his homeland, left
> in
> > the past as it were by the new Soviet system to which he doesn't find
> any
> > connection, and Zembla is the homeland he creates to replace it.
> Neither
> > character is living in the world as it is in the present.
> >
> 
> Excellent comparison between the two characters.  Curiously, it's made all
> the more compelling because one work is told in 3rd person and the other
> in
> 1st person, no?  I wonder how the narrative voice impacts the ways in
> which
> we, as readers, perceive the missed communications?
> 
> 
> 
> 

Doesn't the question of authorial authority enter into this?  Don't we find
a 3rd person narrative more authoritative than that of 1st person?  Perhaps
we are conditioned to suspect the 1st person voice, reduce it immediately to
opinion and limited perspective, while the 3rd person voice has that
compelling pretension to omniscience.  Does this trust in a 3rd person voice
imply our susceptibility to control by others?  If so, with a missed
communication, I think in a 3rd person narrative we are less suspicious of
the *origin* of the message.  When told by the god-narrator that it exists,
then we assume that yes, it must exist.  If Pynchon is concerned with
methods of control, then why assume in his narrative voice one such method?
Or does he work consciously to undermine that voice?

A parallel way in which an authoritative voice speaks in VL is through the
media: for the most part, it's a third person narrative, and for the most
part, its audience doesn't question its authority.  The media must comment
on the world for people stuck to couches, and some of those same people feel
compelled to be commented on.  Are the media so different from literary
critics like Kinbote, predatorily finding a subject to fix upon at a cost
unknown and perhaps irrelevant to them?  And isn't being in the first
edition of John Shade's "Pale Fire" something like being featured on "Good
Morning America"?

akaJasper