re VLVL2 conservative values & wacky comedy

[Paul Nightingale]

>From Terrance:
> 
> Sorry, Paul N, but I don't read VL as a linear text. I don't know why
> anyone else would.

I'm not quite sure why you think I think VL should be read as a linear
text, whatever that is. I'm not quite sure what you mean by a linear
text, so I'm pretty confident I haven't recommended/advocated that kind
of reading. In fact, I've addressed the way the text frequently doubles
back on itself, a sequence of flashbacks, and
flashbacks-within-flashbacks that take the reader back to where they
started.

What I have done is try to focus on the text as written, which I would
argue is something different. You keep saying we should pay attention to
'the novel', or follow Nabokov's advice (as if he's the only one who has
ever said anything like this) and deal with the fictional world, etc.
Yet you undermine this argument when you insist on realist readings that
focus on characters being somehow independent of the text. (My working
definition of realist here, by the way, refers to the way readers expect
some kind of psychological plausibility from characters and situations.)
It seems to me that the 'cut-&-paste' approach (a carefully edited quote
from this page + a carefully edited quote from somewhere else =
'evidence', usually when reading VL for the prosecution) effectively
ignores the fictional world. To dwell on the novel's 'accuracy'
(so-called) in representing 'what really happened' (the differences
between something called '1964' and something called '1970', or
whenever) effectively ignores the fictional world (not least because
such an approach makes the fundamental error of thinking it can know
what happened, in 'the real world', outside of representation. (And
don't worry: we've been here before and I know full well that Pynchon-l
has no interest in such discussions.)

To address the fictional world, it seems to me, is to consider
characters, and the function they have, in context. In a fictional
world, characters are fictional elements that are no more, and no less,
important than any other fictional element. If you adopt a food-chain
approach, you might as well stop pretending you're interested in the
fictional world. What does it mean to say Zoyd is a bad parent? Such an
assertion only makes sense if you have a clear idea of what 'good
parent' and 'bad parent' mean independently of the (any) fictional
world. This involves an awful lot of value judgements about 'good' and
'bad', all the time taking you further and further from the text. This
means using the text as a vehicle to promote your own beliefs: 'I think
Zoyd is disgusting' = 'I'm not disgusting' = 'I'm an upright citizen'
etc.

In fact the more I read VL the more I think it's P's most Brechtian
novel: Zoyd is certainly a character designed to offend the bourgeois
sensibility many readers bring to the text.