unreliable? in Vineland

[jbor]

on 21/6/03 2:31 AM, Terrance wrote:

> We can certainly speak of  "we as readers" by which is meant the
> audience. 

If you're using Booth as your main man then the term you're looking for here
is "mock reader" (see _The Rhetoric of Fiction_, pp. 49-52, 138, 363-364),
or Wolfgang Iser's "implied reader" (or Roman Jakobson's "destinataire"),
which is a different category to what either you or I as readers might
choose to do and think when we read. In this sense you're talking about the
way the text attempts to position the reader through the manipulation of
both discursive and literary features -- direct address, tone, narrative
agency, imagery and symbolism, plot and character etc.

Sometimes an author will set up the narrative artifice of "reliability" -- a
narrator, whether first or third person, who is supposedly "telling it like
it is". In this respect I agree with Tim, that this is what Pynchon is
purporting to do in _Vineland_. However, the very idea of a "reliable
artifice" is fraught, oxymoronic, and Pynchon foregrounds this by having his
narrator address obviously fantastic elements of the story in the same tone
and style as the "real" events and situations are treated, and by
intertwining these elements within the narrative. Self-consciously, Pynchon
disrupts or subverts the narrow "reliable/unreliable" dichotomy.

Obviously, when the narrative voice filters through one or other of the
character's pov's, which is a characteristic Pynchonian narrative technique,
the diction of that character is adopted too. Pynchon's novels are thus
explicitly "dialogic" in the Bakhtinian sense. Doing this isn't
"omniscient", by the way, because it's both selective and intermittent.
Essentially, narrative agency momentarily adopts one character's limited
point of view:

      "Froot Loops again I guess," he muttered at the note. With
    enough Nestle's Quik on top, they weren't all that bad ....

There's a shift from the style of conventional detached narrative used in
the first sentence, where the "I" in the spoken utterance and the "he" in
the narration which follows are distinct, to the way Zoyd's pov has been
assimilated into the narrative in the second sentence. It shifts back again
in the following sentence. Here, and it occurs again in the last paragraph
on the first page, it also happens to signify a difference between what Zoyd
says aloud and what he thinks to himself. But it doesn't always conform to
this pattern.

best