Finding a Form, by William Gass - Dalkey Archive

[Andrew Lack]

It's funny. I met Gas a few years back at a reading he gave in  
Amherst. During the Q and A I asked him why he never wrote a  
substantial essay on Pynchon as he has on Faulkner and James et al,  
and he replied, somewhat to my astonishment, that he disliked Pynchon  
and never even cared to read Gravity's Rainbow due to what he felt was  
"Pynchon's flippant use of science." A part of me still thinks the  
author of The Tunnel, if not Gas himself, may have been lying. Go  
figure.

Lackman



On Aug 18, 2009, at 7:42 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> . . .a concept crucial to our understanding of literature and its
> effects is "voice." Even when we write in the first person and
> construct a voice of our invented narrator to speak in, there is
> always an overvoice in which our character finds a place: he author's
> voice, the style which tells us, whoever is speaking--Lear or Hamlet
> or Juliet--that it is Shakespeare nevertheless, in whose verbal stream
> they are swimming; or we hear the unmistakable tones of Henry James,
> of Flaubert, or Faulkner, in each red necked, red-earthed farmer, in
> every bumbling bourgeois or bewildered American lady.
>
> "Finding a Form," p.44 _Finding a Form_, William H. Gass
>
> This is as old as literature: Shakespeare's characters sound like
> themselves and always like Shakespeare, too. It is not really Cornwall
> who wonderfully calls Gloucester's eye a "a vile jelly" before he rips
> it out--though Cornwall speaks the words--but Shakespeare, who has
> provided the phrase.        A contemporary writer like David Foster
> Wallace wants to push this tension to limit. He writes from within his
> characters' voices and simultaneously over then, obliterating them in
> order to explore larger, if more abstract, questions of language.
>
> "David Foster Wallace," p.30 _How Fiction Works_,   James Wood
>
>
> The ugly language of the media saturated American postmodernist novels
> is certainly evident in IV.   What Gass identifies as the "overvoice"
> is now, in the Pynchon-led American project, a voice over. And it
> makes for ugly reading if we need to put up with more than a page or
> two at a time.
>
> In any event, I thought I would mention this aspect of the
> "Voice-Over" because we need to identify this element and how it
> functions in IV because of the impact it has on our reading the
> distance between the implied author and his norms and the unreliable
> third-person limited narrative of Doc.
>
> Also, no one can complain about flat characterizations in a
> third-person limited narrative. It comes with the territory.
> Cartoons are another matter.
>