IV Chapter 17 Thoughts

[Mark Kohut]

Alice writes:

The narrative is unreliable. 

Where, what events, observations, remarks?


The
author creates a distance between himself and the protagonist
Show me it here, anywhere please.

 and
narrator and then exploits that ironies and ambiguities that this
narrative technique affords. 

To dismiss this is to deny the modern and
postmodern novel.

No, only to deny that this genre parody is not postmodern but simply a modern-enough mystery story with resonant overtones---autobiographical resonances I say. 

--- On Thu, 12/10/09, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:

> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> Subject: Re: IV Chapter 17 Thoughts
> To: pynchon-l at waste.org
> Date: Thursday, December 10, 2009, 8:28 PM
> On Thu, Dec 10, 2009 at 11:09 AM,
> Robin Landseadel
> <robinlandseadel at comcast.net>
> wrote:
> > On Dec 10, 2009, at 7:38 AM, Carvill, John wrote:
> >
> >> I really really wish you would cease acting as if
> you are the world's
> >> greatest authority on Chandler. It is immensely
> annoying.
> >
> > Sorry if you find this annoying. I find the relation
> between Chandler's
> > writing and "Inherent Vice" crucial and I'm not going
> to stop writing about
> > it.
> 
> Crucial or not, and I certainly don't agree that Chandler
> is crucial
> to Pynchon, or even to a reading of IV, it's obvious that
> Robin has
> identified one of the authors that P has elected to parody
> and hold
> his fun house mirrors up to. Robin's work, when focused,
> reminds me of
> Dave Monroe's job with Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon
> Pym of
> Nantucket (1838), and other Poe tales, and how Poe's novel
> was
> published and the like, and I've been giving Poe's
> "postmodernism" and
> "unreliability" some thought; how it may parallel Pynchon's
> IV
> project. Chandler is not the central parodic text, but is
> only one of
> many in the genre because Pynchon simply doesn't work that
> way. He
> never has, and he clearly has not in this work, written a
> work that
> responds to one author or text or genre or one in which one
> author,
> text, or genre is the focus of his parody. While Poe's Pym,
> for
> example, is important to our reading of V., it is not
> crucial. I
> disagree with Robin's assessment of the text; that it is
> largely
> biographical and set in Pynchon's life in and around the
> times he was
> living in California and composing GR. Again, the narrator,
> the
> protagonist, is not the author. The narrative is
> unreliable. The
> author creates a distance between himself and the
> protagonist and
> narrator and then exploits that ironies and ambiguities
> that this
> narrative technique affords. To dismiss this is to deny the
> modern and
> postmodern novel.
>