Pynchon and fascism

[jbor]

>>> What you describe as "weak modality" above is P writing in the
> present
>>> tense for the first time in the Foreword.
>> 
>> Sorry, "could" isn't present tense. The word "can" is. In this
> instance
>> "could" is a modal verb. A weak one.
>> 

on 2/6/03 9:23 AM, Paul Nightingale at isread at btopenworld.com wrote:

> Agreed if we're simply talking about the word "could" in isolation.

My examples of weak modality were "could certainly argue" and "had behaved
no differently than". You responded: "What you describe as 'weak modality'
above is P writing in the present tense for the first time in the Foreword."
That was inaccurate, a misreading or misrepresentation of what I wrote.

> However, P uses this particular construction when speaking, in this
> paragraph, in the present tense, for the first time in the Foreword and
> significantly so.

This is not quite true either: "Although Big Brother's face certainly is
Stalin's ... Goldstein's face is Trotsky's ... the two do not quite line up
with their models .... " (p. viii); "something very much like brainwashing
happens in _1984_" (p. ix); "Though 1984 has brought aid and comfort to
generations of anticommunist ideologues ... " (p. ix). I agree that the
"fascistic disposition" paragraph is an unusual one, but its grammar is
certainly stylistically consistent with this last-quoted clause.

> If the phrase "could certainly argue" remains
> ambiguous, ie it could refer to a past-tense construction, I think my
> reading is supported by "had behaved" following it.

There's no ambiguity. It's not a present tense verb; it's a modal auxiliary.
It expresses possibility. Its use here confirms the way the present and
future tense constructions, and the "if ... then" statements, earlier in the
paragraph, are used to evoke a hypothetical scenario.

> The fact that,
> grammatically speaking, could is a modal verb, is surely less important
> than its function in context, the way the paragraph as a whole works in
> the context of the Foreword as a whole.

Its use is quite consistent with the way the grammar of the paragraph is
working.

best

> At the top of this post, you
> emphasise the big picture, P's "main topic in this section". Here, you
> seem to deny the big picture, the way the paragraph as a whole works.