Zoyd still, but Back to the past: IV

[Mark Kohut]

Thanks Alice for my Boothian education. Maybe I don't have to find my copy now...lotsa fascinating stuff, most I don't want to go into now myself, but it is an open list...(jump in all; the water's still fine)

alice writes:
"IV has an unreliable third-person limited narrator".   

I might call the narrator an effaced one, as James, maybe, first focused on and as Pynchon has used in previous books. But maybe effaced and limited meann the same thing.

What I hope you and others will show, after positing it above, is where, how, the narrator is unreliable, specifically, in IV.    

You have not yet challenged my starting observations about some reliable simple distinctions and observations Doc makes. We yet have no reason not to see the facts and details in the world (in Chap 1, let's limit for now)
as Doc does. 

In fact, one might suggest that Pynchon gives us a reliable reality on page one when Shasta joked about Doc hallucinating, but he is not. He/she are real. 

I might also suggest that a certain kind of unreliable narrator could NOT be a P.I. who could solve a case. P in the novel, gives us a real solved case and other events---as well as his usual encoded themes. 

Unreliable is as unreliable does, yes?



--- On Sun, 8/23/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: Zoyd still, but Back to the past: IV
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Sunday, August 23, 2009, 10:17 PM
> My readings always improve when I
> discuss specific passages with the
> P-List so I'm not prepared to stop talking about Zoyd or
> Vineland. I
> ignore a lot. I deleted a lot without reading. Often, I
> wish I had
> said something but failed to. More often, it matters little
> what I say
> once it's read and responded to. It evokes a meaning I
> neither
> intended nor conveyed.  It is what it is & All is
> Well . . .as the
> Jesuits taught me, what I have done and what I have failed
> to do can
> both buy me a first class ticket to eternal damnation. Not
> that I
> still believe in any of that superstitious nonsense, but
> I'll never
> need to smoke dope or take LSD to experience hallucinations
> and all
> manner of metaphysical revelations. Don't even need to fall
> off Paul's
> or Mason's horse. A bit like Zappa,  I was surrounded
> by chemicals,
> not pesticides or military industrial complex chemistry but
> their
> forebearers,  throughout my childhood. My friends, who
> imbibed every
> drug the street could mix up were always complaining about
> it.
> Sometimes they could see, if they paid attention, focused,
> relaxed,
> let it be. But most of the time they didn't have the
> fortitude or the
> patience. Imagine going to see Fear & Loathing with
> Alice whose been
> in wonderland all her life. No burnt throat, no windowpane
> Windex
> brain, no hangover, no Jones, no crawling under a truck and
> howling at
> the unborn angels riding the dynamos of despair out to
> Brooklyn and
> Colorado for fixes and visions  illuminated, never.
> 
> You can blame me or you or the man in the moon. It's as
> cool as you
> need it to be.
> 
> > 1) I did not conflate even my misreading with the
> author's norms yet...I was just starting to define Doc's
> character.
> 
> We should work at this. I started when I noted how Doc got
> his name.
> 
> > 2) Yes, he does want an endless summer. Reliable,
> unreliable? So far, we have to take it straight AND even
> having finished the book, using other unreliable narrators
> as touchstones, ones who GET THE FACTS IN THEIR LIVES
> WRONG----The Good Soldier; The Remains of The Day---Doc is
> not that kind of unreliable narrator.
> 
> Unreliable Narrator is such a confusing term so I'll need
> to turn to
> Wiki. When I use the term I'm using in the sense defined by
> Booth.
> Same goes for "implied author" and "author's norms."
> 
> [Booth's] major work was The Rhetoric of Fiction. In this
> book, Booth
> argues that all narrative is a form of rhetoric, that is,
> an argument
> on the part of author in defense of his or her "various
> commitments,
> secret or overt [that] determine our response to the
> work".   The
> majority of these commitments are based on morals and
> morality, Booth
> argues. The speaker in narrative is the author or, more
> specifically,
> the implied author, which Booth also calls an author's
> "second self"
> who "chooses, consciously or unconsciously, what we read;
> we infer him
> as an ideal, literary, created version of the real man; he
> is the sum
> of his own choices"
> The implied author is a compromise between old-fashioned
> biographical
> criticism, the new critics who argued that one can only
> talk about
> what the text says, and modern criticism that argued for
> the
> "eradication" of authorial presence. Booth argued that it
> is
> impossible to talk about a text without talking about an
> author,
> because the existence of the text implies the existence of
> an author.
> Booth's argument was, particularly, a response to modern
> critics who,
> starting from Henry James, emphasized the difference
> between "showing"
> and "telling" in fiction, always placing a premium on the
> importance
> of "showing." Such a distinction is deeply flawed according
> to Booth,
> for authors routinely both show and tell, deciding which
> technique to
> use based on their aesthetic decisions about which way to
> convey their
> "commitments." Authors often make their own contributions
> in their
> works, and they also include those of narrators, whether
> reliable,
> unreliable, partial or impartial. Booth notes the
> important
> differences among these contributors, however, pointing out
> that the
> author is distinct from the narrator of the text. He uses
> the examples
> of stories with an unreliable narrator to prove this point,
> observing
> that, in these stories, the whole point of the story is
> lost if one
> confuses narrator and author.
> In fiction, an unreliable narrator (a term coined by Wayne
> C. Booth in
> his 1961 book The Rhetoric of Fiction) is a narrator whose
> credibility
> has been seriously compromised. The use of this type of
> narrator is
> called unreliable narration and is a narrative mode that
> can be
> developed by the author for a number of reasons, though
> usually to
> make a negative statement about the narrator. This
> unreliability can
> be due to psychological instability, a powerful bias, a
> lack of
> knowledge, or even a deliberate attempt to deceive the
> reader or
> audience. Unreliable narrators are usually first-person
> narrators, but
> third-person narrators can also be unreliable.
> "I have called a narrator reliable when he speaks for or
> acts in
> accordance with the norms of the work [...] unreliable when
> he does
> not" (158-59). Later in Booth's explanation it becomes
> clear that the
> concept of unreliable narration refers to narrators who are
> "morally
> and intellectually deficient" (307).
> 
> 
> IV has an unreliable third-person limited narrator.
> 
> An excellent example of the third-person-limited and
> unreliable
> narrator is Wright's Native Son.
> Wright uses this narrative technique to get the reader
> close to the
> protagonist. Since the point of the novel reveals the mind
> of a
> dehumanized black man cornered in the ghetto, the reader
> must identify
> with Bigger Thomas. Wright wanted readers to understand how
> hostile
> the American environment is to those who have already been
> excluded
> based on skin color.  But Wright did not want readers
> to miss the
> ironies that Bigger doesn't see or get. Bigger sees that he
> has been
> accused and convicted  of murdering and raping a white
> girl simply
> because he is a black man.  And, of course, Wright
> expects the reader
> to know that when Bigger murders and rapes his girl friend,
> a black
> girl, crushing her head with a brick and stuffing her body
> in a duct,
> he has committed a crime far worse than his murder of Mary.
> That the
> Bigger doesn't care or see they hypocrisy in this but one
> example of
> his unreliable narrative. We have to read for the norms of
> the text
> and not be sucked in by the protagonist-narrator no matter
> how
> brilliant and charming He (Humbert Humbert) may be.
> 
>