Irony & Narrative Commentary & Control in VL & adorno

[Terrance]

> 
> 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 ...





Yes. A varied strategy.

As Willie Lowman said, "It (a varied strategy)  goes with the
[interiority]."

Various narrative strategies, techniques, and devices for communicating
interiority are at work in VL.

VL is, after all, a Modern novel.

Bringing fictional language and rhythms closer to actual speech by
introducing colloquialisms and slang and by using straightforward
Grammatical structures, trying to avoid grandiosity and pompous themes,
celebrating the ordinary textures and rhythms of life ...  these are
some of the most obvious characteristics of Modernist Literature.  So is
the use of irony by sudden changes in diction and contrasts in ideas
which undercut what seems to be said on the surface (disjunctive irony).
Modernism is often credited with a very cruel sense of irony. Events
tend to debase and dehumanize people. The authors of Modern fiction
often set out to shock the reader in order to undercut "fixed" systems
of values and so on. Modernists turned to the contents and consciousness
of individual human minds. Consequently, authors focalized the novel in
the minds or private narratives of its character. There was a tendency
to "look within" and place "everything in the mind"; transcribe an inner
mental world at the expense of the external social experience favored in
the conventional, realist forms of earlier fiction. Some critics argue
that this technique culminates in the novel in the use of a technique of
a stream of consciousness. This technique was used to represent deeper
levels of a character's consciousness, an unmediated directness of
thoughts. The term comes from Henry James's brother William James:
"Consciousness, then, does not appear to itself chopped up in bits . . .
it is nothing jointed; it flows. A "river" or a "stream" are the
metaphors by which it is most naturally described. In talking of it
hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of
subjective life." But there are many devices covered under the loose
term "stream-of-consciousness" and these now an established part of the
postmodern novelist's repertory.

Rather than dig deep into the middle of the book I'll stick with the
examples we have been discussing from Chapter One.

Back up a bit. We began by looking at POV and Irony. 

Point of View and Person are overworked distinctions that don't tell us
a hell of a lot unless we get very precise and describe how the
particular qualities of the narrators are related to specific effects.
So, I don't think that "Person" and "POV" are useless but we need to
qualify these and provide specific examples of the effects of the use of
person and POV by the narrators. Again, if you take a couple few of your
favorite "first-person" narratives and favorite "third-person
narratives" and compare them it is obvious how very limited the
distinctions "point off view" and "Person" are. Moreover, all of the
functional distinctions that I listed from Booth (Dramatized and
Undramatized, Observers and Narrative Agents, Scene and Summary,
Commentary, Self-Conscious Narrators, Variations of Distance, Variations
in Support or Correction, Privilege, Inside Views) apply to both
first-person and third-person.


We begin (page 3) with what seems to be a third-person undramatized
unreliable observer narrative.

Description of Zoyd drifting awake in the summer of 1984.

We shift back in time a little to Z's dream.

3.4 "In his dream [the blue jays] had been..."

How does the narrator  know that the blue jays stomping (1) around on
the roof were carrier pigeons in Z's dream?

One possibility is that the  narrator is omniscient.

There are lots of other possibilities.

The narrator is not omniscient (having total knowledge,  knowing
everything,  god-like).

However, the narrator does have Privileges and Inside Views.

The narrator(s) in VL are not omniscient (total privilege) but have
limited privilege (what they know and what they can show). One important
privilege that the narrator of chapter one (narrator of pages 3-68) has
is the privilege to obtain an inside view of a character. For example,
the narrator knows what Z thinks, how he thinks, what he dreams, how he
interprets his dreams.

(1) Blue jays are tough birds but they don't stomp and they don't get an
attitude from eating dog food and then chase cars and people down ...
unless they are cartoon blue jays or the blue jays of an urban
legend. Urban legends, TV, and Movies ... this narrator picks up his
diction and lots of other stuff from the various media influences on
location.

Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. The University of Chicago
Press, 1961

Friedman, Melvin J. Stream of Consciousness: the Study of a Literary
Method. New  Haven: Yale University Press, 1955.

Humphrey, Robert. Stream of Consciousness in the Modern Novel.
Berkeley:  University of California Press, 1962.