unreliable narrators

[Robin Landseadel]

On Dec 11, 2009, at 6:46 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> What about IV? Can we agree that IV's narrator is unreliable and
> therefore fits out definition (W. Booth)?

Well of course not!

[I think you probably meant to say—"and therefore fits our definition"— 
but that would be putting words in your mouth, which I guess is  
probably worse than "assuming." And who am us, anyway?]

I suspect in my paranoid little heart that we are all being  
unwittingly trained to see issues framed as having binary sides 
—"you're either with us or against us!"—[thank you "Professional  
Sports", thank you "Christian Church", thank you Tube. thank you the  
internets] and seeing as I have not read essays on "unreliable  
narrators" there's no point in me taking up sides anyway.

What I'm seeing with "my own two" is how the narrators of Pynchon's  
fictions have fluidity, how they shape-shift, morph. Sometimes the  
narrator [at any given moment] is questioning the contents of what was  
previously written. Occasionally the narrator [s] steps out of the  
frame for a moment, making comments or asides—see page 117 of "Against  
the Day." There is a fluidity to the identity of the "I"/"Eye"  
narrating, there are moments in Pynchon's fictions where the  
narrator[s] is/are questioning himself/themselves, characters take  
over the role of the narrator, questioning the authority of the  
omniscient "I" that has been telling the tale—so far. I/we guess  
that's part of what makes Pynchon's writing—in the words of well-known  
literary commentator Stephen Colbert—"Experimental Fiction."

This is my favorite—

	"There never was a Dr. Jamf," opines world-renowned analyst
	Mickey Wuxtry-Wuxtry—"Jamf was only a fiction, to help him
	explain what he felt so terribly, so immediately in his genitals for
	those rockets each time exploding in the sky ... to help him deny
	what he could not possibly admit: that he might be in love, in
	sexual love, with his, and his race's, death.

	"These early Americans, in their way, were a fascinating
	combination of crude poet and psychic cripple .... "

	"We were never that concerned with Slothrop qua Slothrop," a
	spokesman for the Counterforce admitted recently in an
	interview with the Wall Street Journal.

	INTERVIEWER: You mean, then, that he was more a rallying-	
	point.

	SPOKESMAN: No, not even that. Opinion even at the start was
	divided. It was one of our fatal weaknesses. [I'm sure you want
	to hear about fatal weaknesses.] Some called him a "pretext."
	Others felt that he was a genuine, point-for-point microcosm.
	The Microcosmists, as you must know from the standard
	histories, leaped off to an early start. We—it was a very odd
	form of heretic-chasing, really. Across the Low Countries, in the
	summer. It went on in fields of windmills, marshlands where it
	was almost too dark to get a decent sight. I recall the time
	Christian found an old alarm clock, and we salvaged the
	radium, to coat our plumb-bob strings with. They shone in the
	twilight. You've seen them holding bobs, hands
	characteristically gathered near the crotch. A dark figure with a
	stream of luminescent piss falling to the ground fifty meters
	away ... "The Presence, pissing," that became a standard joke
	on the apprentices. A Raketen-Stadt Charlie Noble, you might
	say .... [Yes. A cute way of putting it. I am betraying them all . . .
	the worst of it is that I know what your editors want, exactly what
	they want. I am a traitor. I carry it with me. Your virus. Spread by
	your tireless Typhoid Marys, cruising the markets and the
	stations. We did manage to ambush some of them. Once we
	caught some in the Underground. It was terrible. My first action,
	my initiation. We chased them down the tunnels. We could feel
	their fright. When the tunnels branched, we had only the
	treacherous acoustics of the Underground to go on. Chances
	were good for getting lost. There was almost no light. The rails
	gleamed, as they do aboveground on a rainy night. And the
	whispers then—the shadows who waited, hunched in angles at
	the maintenance stations, lying against the tunnel walls,
	watching the chase. "The end is too far," they whispered. "Go
	back. There are no stops on this branch. The trains run and the
	passengers ride miles of blank mustard walls, but there are no
	stops. It's a long afternoon run .... " Two of them got away. But
	we took the rest. Between two station-marks, yellow crayon
	through the years of grease and passage, 1966 and 1971, I
	tasted my first blood. Do you want to put this part in?] We drank
	the blood of our enemies. That's why you see Gnostics so
	hunted. The sacrament of the Eucharist is really drinking the
	blood of the enemy. The Grail, the Sangraal, is the bloody
	vehicle. Why else guard it so sacredly? Why should the black
	honor-guard ride half a continent, half a splintering Empire,
	stone night and winter day, if it's only for the touch of sweet lips
	on a humble bowl? No, it's mortal sin they're carrying: to
	swallow the enemy, down into the slick juicery to be taken in by
	all the cells. Your officially defined "mortal sin," that is. A sin
	against you. A section of your penal code, that's all. [The true
	sin was yours: to interdict that union. To draw that line. To keep
	us worse than enemies, who are after all caught in the same
	fields of shit-to keep us strangers.

	We drank the blood of our enemies. The blood of our friends,
	we cherished.]

	Gravity's Rainbow, Penguin ed., pages 753/754