Who rewinds Krapp's last tape?

[Terrance]

"nothing can really stop the abreaction of the Lord of the
  Night unless....the entire film runs backwards....But the
  reality is not REVERSABLE." 




  Two critics look at REVERSALS in Pynchon:

  McHale addressing the opening dream scene of GR:

  With this REVERSAL (my caps) begins the reader's
  re-education - or, to borrow a metaphor from the Pavlovian
  discourse which this novel sometimes affects, his
  de-conditioning.

  For this passage is a paradigm of problematic passages
  throughout Gravity's Rainbow: the reader, invited to
  reconstruct a "real" scene or action in the novel's fictive
  world, is forced in retrospect -sometimes in long retrospect
  - to "cancel" the reconstruction he has made, and to
  relocate it within a character's dream, hallucination, or
  fantasy.

  After such an embarrassment, the reader, in order to
  reassert his mastery over the text, may evoke the model of a
  genre or period which will "explain" what has happened to
  him. In this case, he may evoke the model of so-called
  "Post-Modern" fiction. In doing so he will presumably have
  in mind certain contemporary (post-war) fictional texts
  which are strongly self-conscious, self-reflective,
  self-critical; which, by laying bare their own devices,
  continually raise the problem of the relation between the
  game-like artifices of fiction and the imitation of reality;
  which actively resist and subvert the reader's efforts to
  make sense of them in the familiar
  novelistic ways; the sort of texts which the French would be
  apt to call texts of the "practice of writing." But such a
  model, particularly when used in this defensive or
  naturalizing way, is apt to draw less on the full range of
  phenomena it ought to capture than on certain extreme cases:
  Robbe-Grillet at his most choisiste, Borges at his most
  labyrinthine, Beckett at his most minimal. The example of
  such limit-texts is not, however, very helpful in dealing
  with the intractabilities of Gravity's Rainbow, which falls
  somewhat short of these limits. 


  McHale notes the Parody and Mock-Modernism--James and
  Conrad-- in Pynchon's  CL, V., Entropy, Under the Rose. 


  ELH 65.2 (1998) 503-521 Imperium, Misogyny, and Postmodern
  Parody in Thomas Pynchon's V. Stefan Mattessich. 

  "No one who reads Thomas Pynchon can deny the force and
  inventiveness of his prose. His prolix imagination verges on
  the uncanny, and his mastery of various discourses awes all
  who experience it. But if Pynchon is an exuberant writer, he
  is so only by virtue of a counterforce acting upon that
  forcefulness, interrupting its flows in particular
  ways--cutting into a dramatic sequence with an absurd song,
  modulating from a clipped comic diction and tone to epic
  sentences a page long, mingling tragedy with pornography,
  melodrama with slapstick. The diffraction of modes and
  genres through the disjointed narratives of V. reflects a
  highly organized, crystalline structure that is nonetheless
  anarchic, patterned and intricate yet loose-jointed and
  expansive."

  All of these attributes can be attributed to Pynchon's debt
  to the Satirists with a capital M.

  See Hollander's "Pynchon's Inferno" (1978), Frye's 'Anatomy
  of Criticism' "Theory Of Genres" and for direct comparison
  to Mattessich's Post-modern reading of V. see 'A Hand to
  Turn the Time' chapter 2 "V.: Beyond the Veil" Kharpertian,
  Theodore D.

  Mattessich continues:
   
  A subversion of expenditure takes place within the mutations
  of narrative form, undermining the illusions of continuity
  and
  depth, frustrating the possibilities of coherence and
  closure. A peculiar emptying out of content attends this
  subversion in V., marking in the language a lightness and
  strange insubstantiality that is often difficult to gauge. 
  This quality in Pynchon's prose corresponds to what
  Baudrillard calls a logic of simulation, in which, through
  successive orders of abstraction, the "real" withdraws into
  a permanent elsewhere, and systems of meaning (signs,
  images, discourses) no longer bear any relation to a stable
  referent, but instead float in the medium of their own
  "divine irreference," a hyper-real which "envelops the whole
  edifice of representation." 1 This breakdown of meaning is
  variously described by Baudrillard as a process of
  "satellitization," as a proliferation of signs incapable of
  dissimulating their own hollowness, as an implosion or a
  "non-distinction of active and passive" opposites, as a
  neutralization or "annihilation of stakes" in the political
  and social spheres. 2 In the postmodern world Baudrillard
  describes, 


      All events are to be read in REVERSE (my caps), where
  one perceives . . . that all . . . things arrive too late,
  with an overdue history, a lagging spiral, that they have
  exhausted their meaning long in advance and only survive as
  an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events
  follow on illogically from one [End Page 503] another, with
  a total equanimity toward the greatest inconsistencies . . .
  --thus the whole newsreel of the "present" gives the
  sinister impression of kitsch, retro and porno all at the
  same time.3 

  Although Baudrillard is here speaking about the effect of
  the news media on contemporary culture, it could be said
  that V. exemplifies this exhaustion, this artificial
  effervescence of signs exactly. Pynchon's novel enacts a
  search for meaning or substance behind the initial V., which
  stands for a whole range of possible signifiers, partial
  objects, fetishes, puzzles, secret codes,and for the novel
  itself: V. as the signifier of the desire for "real" or
  authentic writing. But in
  what McHoul and Wills call V.'s "eternal condemnation to the
  signifier," the necessary failure of this voicing becomes
  itself an obsession of the text.