Irony & Narrative Commentary & Control in VL & adorno

[Michael Joseph]

>
> > 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.
>
> OK. What purpose?
>
ut infra

>
> 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.
>
>
>
> 1. Pynchon is mimetically invoking the interiority of the character.
>
> OK
>
> 2. at some point relative to his discovery of events that at this point
> are yet to be
>
> The narrative switches back and forth from the base narrative voice to
> the mimetically invoked interiority of the characters (in the examples
> we have thus far the character is Zoyd Wheeler) throughout the novel.

Leaving aside the question of a "base narrative voice," let me just
briefly point out that Pynchon uses a varied strategy for communicating a
character's interiority. In the example under discussion, he is modeling
interiority, but elsewhere he simply describes it, e.g. "And there was
takeshi in the back seat of a strange over-size Ameican car, locked in,
being borne through the streets of Shinjuku southward, crossing the
Expressway, into Roppongi, expecting street mines, storms of
automatic-weapon fire, convinced he had stumbled into the middle of some
Japanese gang-war drama with a couple of gaijin [italics] bit players in
it."

  I
> don't see why it is significant that the voice shifts to interior
> diction at the point when the narrator provides the reader with
> information about future events that the character cannot be or clearly
> is not aware of. What has this shift to interior diction to do with the
> workings of irony?

Consider that the shift constitutes irony on two levels: "rude update"
comically understates the significance of the event so that it intensifies
its meaning and effect. This sort of irony saturates popular
entertainment, and perhaps it always has: think of Blind Lemon Jefferson's
line: "One kind favor I ask of you/See that my grave is kept clean." The
quotidian "kind favor" sets off the horror of finality. And as Pynchon
abandons narrative detachment to model Zoyd's experience, the irony
obtains within the narrative play and how the narrator intervenes in the
story. Pynchon's choice of a bastard language resonates against other
possible choices, and foregrounds one of the novel's central tropes, the
contrast of history and in illo tempore, that time. The consubstantiality
of the implicit lofty POV and the explicit low POV heightens the reader's
perecption, which is of course irony.

> Whenever a narrator conveys to the reader a point
> that is in effect unspoken, he creates  a sense of collusion against all
> those who do not get it. Irony is always, thus in part a technique or
> device of exclusion and inclusion. Since, in the VL example,  the reader
> is included, because those who happen to have the necessary information
> (the narrative agent and Slide and so on) provide it to the reader, the
> reader can grasp the irony. What matter who tells us and in what
> voice?
>
Perhaps in your application of irony voice and (let us not forget) mood,
do not matter. But I think part of a reader's task to look at where the
author is putting in the work, and so I think a critical technique that
shears away this part of _VL_ does not tell us much about _VL._


Michael]

> 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?
> > >
> > >
>
>