unreliable? in Vineland (getting closer to an idea)

[Tim Strzechowski]

Let me try to gather this together:

jbor states:

> 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 backagain
> 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
whatZoyd
> says aloud and what he thinks to himself. But it doesn't always conform to
> this pattern.
>

... and Michael Joseph states:

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.

I say:

So, if I gather correctly, both of you are essentially saying (more or less)
the same thing: part of what we call Pynchon's "style" stems from his
ability to weave formal diction (what jbor calls "conventional detached
narrative" and what MJ calls "austerely poetical diction") with informal
diction (what jbor calls "Zoyd's pov ... assimilated" and what MJ calls
"hipster vernacular"), and when this is done to the extent that it not only
affects dialogue (obviously) but also the narrative "voice" (which Pynchon
frequently adapts to the vernacular of a particular character in all his
fiction), this act of narration is blurred, blurred beyond mere "reliable"
and "unreliable" labels.  Am I correct here?

So Pynchon's use of diction is, in effect, part of what we must consider
when coming to terms with his narrative voice (in the instances I brought up
earlier) and whether we can call it "reliable."  Yes?


Tim asked Terrance:

> > Regardless, how does it loop back to the original question of narrator
> > reliability?

and Terrance replied:

> We are getting to this. First we need to talk a bit more about
> Privilege, specifically Inside Views.


Terrance, how does this above discussion relate to what you were saying
earlier about "privilege"?  "Inside views"?

Tim