Woodstock - SPOILER ALERT

[alice wellintown]

In his useful and easy to read _How to Read Novels Like a Professor_,
Thomas C.  Foster (won't even mention James Wood's latest, _How
Fiction Works_ . . . ooops ... or the master of unreliable narration,
double scoooops ooops ... Henry James) says, "Never Trust a Narrator
with a Speaking Part." This is the title of chapter four in which he
discusses the "unreliable narrator" as that phrase or term is now
used, loosely and without much meaning, to describe nearly every
narrator, reflector, character with a speaking part in modern and
postmodern fiction. Not a very rigorous approach. Perfect! This is the
Pynchon List. No need to get all tied up in meta-double-talk and
contradictions of our genius author when we have handy phrases like
Both/And and "which do you want it to be." Right? Well, if we really
do love our genius author perhaps we should ask, "what would Tom do?"
And,  thank Tom, we have an answer. One that is not too convoluted too
(oooops, I'm not supposed to end a sentence with too) and what have
you. We can drop the big fat book of lies, that is, the novel or
novels, and pick up the essays. That's how our genius author works out
Orwell's meta-double think.

Foster says that all first person narrators are unreliable. Not
exactly. I can think of one right off the bat that belies his claim:
Alice Walker's _The Color Purple_. But, be that as it may, Foster's
point is a good one: the first person narrator can not be trusted.

It's a funny thing that has happened to this lit crit term
"Unreliable." It used to have a far more complex meaning and one that
is way more useful to readers of Pynchon novel. Ironically, it is
Wayne C. Booth who came up with it and the applied author and several
other terms now no longer in use or not rigorously anyways.

For Booth, who admits that these terms are all quite hopelessly
inadequate, "unreliable" means that the narrator does NOT speak for or
act in accordance with the norms of the work (which is to say, the
applied author's norms). Even reliable narrators, that is, those that
do speak and act in accordance with the norms of the applied author
are partly "unreliable" when they use irony. But incidental irony,
while potentially deceptive, and often difficult to understand, does
not render the narrator unreliable. Nor is unreliability a matter of
lying. Unreliability, and again, Henry James certainly helps us here
but oooops ....is usually  a matter of unconscience; the narrator is
mistaken, or he believes himself to have qualities which the author
denies him. Or, as may be the case with our Doc, the narrator claims
to be stupid or stoned or wicked or burnt out, while the author, often
with irony or subtle and quiet words, praises the narrator for his
intelligence, his clear thinking,his virtue, his with-it-ness.

All this has much to do with tone and distance and style. And irony.

The Both / And reading simply conflates these elements of our genius
author and reduces them to political preachings loud and clear enough
to anyone who has the magic ear, provided, of course, that they are of
the right or better Left of the Left mind  to hear the sermon. Of
course, it's difficult for anyone here to hear themselves think as the
noise of information overload. almost all of it pumped out to maintain
a certain P-L culture, is deafening.

Most unreliably Yours,

Alice Well