Woodstock - SPOILER ALERT

[Mark Kohut]

Very fine post on 'the unreliable narrator'. Here's a simplistic
way to focus on it. 

Does the narrator see 'things as they are'? "The Good Soldier" is one of the seminal novels with an unreliable narrator in which we learn that even the happenings in the novel do not happen as he says.

Less clear is this question: Does how the narrator understand people or events in the novel match the way the author sees them? We need to be able to point to the author's 'vision' in the text to see/say this?

Not everything in Pynchon, in fact, far less than we on the plist have thrown around, yes, Alice, is Both/And. Both/And mostly applies to TRPs rejection of certain cultural "certainties"...the certainty of the scientific understanding of EVERYTHING, to oversimplify. 

Both/And, for example does not apply to TRPs presentation of most of his characters, most of his savagely satiric scenes....

"Which do you want it to be" is, to me, just a fine way to ask us what we think about a subtle scene.....With P, as with other great writers, there are multiple subtleties; there are also an infinite number of 'bad' readings. 

P PURPOSELY wants a wealth of resonances for much in his books. Richness of meaning is part of his meaning. (See that 'I write like those layered
medical textbooks' riff he gave a friend.) 

For Doc: how much of it all comes just because of his consciousness? Did he ever see a "chick"--what does this word say about him?--- NOT in a mini-skirt? Even given the times? Did he ever see one that did not turn him erect? Why not? 




--- On Mon, 8/17/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Woodstock - SPOILER ALERT
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Monday, August 17, 2009, 7:49 AM
> 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
>