Irony & Narrative Commentary & Control in VL & adorno

[Michael Joseph]

I thought I was placing my remarks in context, but, well, please let me
spell it out a bit more. In critiquing irony in Pynchon, particularly
within the context of a discourse about the reliability of the narrator
wrapped within another discourse about the omniscient narrator, one cannot
in good conscience say he has completed the job while ignoring diction.
When writing in the third person, Pynchon consistently modulates between a
kind of hipster vernacular and a more austerely poetic diction, and each
has its own unique set of interpretive possibilities, so that when
weighing a phrase like "These were the first of several rude updates," it
is useful for the critic to consider that the colloquial "rude updates"
serves a purpose beyond its semantic and comical effect. The idea is that
Pynchon is mimetically invoking the interiority of the character at some
point relative to his discovery of events that at this point are yet to be
by imitating the character's language--a technique he develops so
extraordinarily in M&D--and that, in this he accomplishes something far
mroe interesting and complex than than merely foreshadowing an event or a
particular plot twist or merely sketching out a plot trajectory. He is
presenting us with both the event and the character in relation to the
event within a coherent temporalized narrative frame, which is what I
meant by parallax view, and he is setting that frame off against the
immediate narrative frame. If PYnchon had written VL only in hipsterese,
one might have greater cause to question the reliability of the narrator,
inasmuch as one could so clearly recognize it as an authorial mask; one
could so easily then consider the geometry of narrative credibility and
implied authorhood. However, given the more mercurial narrator, who,
author-like, dramatizes the interior lives of his characters, I think the
sense of the narrator's reliability solidifies itself because of its
complexity. (We trust the VL narrator becomes he lets us see him play with
the masks.) Interesting, the solidity and what I am used to calling
omniscience of the narrator (although, in view of an element of
indeterminacy here it is difficult to know how to render omniscience)
grows at the expense of what we think we can grasp of the author, or our
sense of the implied author. Pynchon disappears within his chorus of
narrators, though indeed not as conspicuously as he does in M&D.



Michael






 On Fri, 20 Jun 2003, Terrance wrote:

>
> >
> > sidebar: another layer of irony adheres in the diction. Not only is
> > Pynchon giving us a prolepsis of events to come, but by employing the
> > vernacular ("he sure would" "updates"), he is also giving a prolepsis of a
> > a certain process, of how Zoyd and his cohort will metabolize the events,
> > in this way supplying a parallax view (the view of the sliding landscape
> > from within the moving boat as well as the moving boat). In this sense,
> > doesn't the narrator evidence another aspect commonly ascribed to
> > omniscience, and touched on in the quotation from K., by implying multiple
> > points of view coexisting simultaneously?
>
>
> Would be interesting it we can apply parallax and simultaneous-
> multiple- POV to the context. How do these work and what effect do they
> produce in the examples from VL we have been discussing?
>
>