pynchon-l-digest V2 #7335

[Joseph Tracy]

On Dec 11, 2009, at 5:24 AM, alice wellintown wrote:

> Cherrycoke narrates sections of M&D.
> He is one of the narrators.
> He is unreliable.
> Why is this so difficult to understand?
> We know that Cherrycoke's narrative is suspect from the start, his
> motives for telling his tales, his painting himself into historical
> events he could not have been present for, his painting himself in a
> favorable light, his arguments about fictions and histories and how
> they should be handled. His didactic and even subversive motives; his
> audience and their role, the competing narratives and other lements of
> the works that contradict or at least cast serious doubt on his
> reliability. On and on...unreliable.

  Of course there is no God's eye view of anything, or at least none  
that we mortals have access to. This makes all narratives unreliable  
as regards some theoretical absolute truth about what happens.
Perhaps that is the central appeal of fiction . It being the one  
place where there is a true story within the bounds of its world,  
because its "creator/god/author" is a person like the reader who  
lives in a narrative of his/her own making.
If Pynchon is deliberately undermining the convention that a 3rd  
person narrator doesn't "lie" about events in the story being told,  
and therefore breaking down the barriers between the real and unreal  
and between  history,  realistic fiction and myth and provoking us to  
question all frames, all narratives, then this unreliability has  
consequences that ultimately make all traditional methods of literary  
analysis exercises in self delusion.
This would seem to undermine the very idea of a more relatively  
accurate reading. And that is an idea which you seem to favor and  
contend for along with many others. The problem being that any  
interpretation of any event becomes impossible if both the event and  
all events surrounding it may not even be true events within the story.

For me, Cherrycoke is the most reliable kind of narrator because I  
know he is not "God" and that he is telling a version of the story he  
likes , and that "truth" and "meaning" is something that is up to me.

This is nice in that I am not accountable to literary high priests as  
interpreters, and discomfiting (but not so bad) for me because my  
reading is also just another unreliable narrative.

Anyway this whole exercise is pretty interesting and unsettling and  
opens new doors.

So far I am unable to find a clear evidence of unreliability in the  
narrative voice of IV. Pynchon even goes to pains to do a kind of  
Biblical thing (One witness shall not rise up against a man for any  
iniquity , or for any sin, in any sin that he sinneth : at the mouth  
of two witnesses , or at the mouth of three witnesses, shall the  
matter be established. Deu 19:15)of letting every key fact or piece  
of evidence have several  firsthand witnesses. Example:  Police  
records, Bigfoot, Fritz all point to A Prussia's nefarious  
activities. This is a consistent pattern.



> On Fri, Dec 11, 2009 at 5:11 AM, Carvill, John  
> <john.carvill at sap.com> wrote:
>>> Cherrycoke is another unreliable narrator.
>>
>> Oh, ok then!
>>
>> Isn't it even harder than usual to deal with a term like  
>> 'unreliable narrator', when who or what is the 'narrator' is in  
>> itself pretty hard to pin down? Who, for instance, is the narrator  
>> of Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'? With Pynchon - as pointed out by  
>> John Bailey - it's often very hard to say, and there is often a  
>> 'kaleidoscopic' narrator. In IV, there's what appears to be (or  
>> what cal be taken as) a little narratorial blip right at the  
>> start, as we watch Shasta come up the steps, as if from an  
>> omniscient point of view, before snapping into a sort of 'Doc's  
>> point of view' for much of the remainder of the book. However we  
>> dice the general term 'unreliable narrator', I don't think it fits  
>> Doc, not just because he is not literally the narrator. The idea  
>> that his dope smoking might make him unreliable is an interesting  
>> one, but ultimately I don't think that really fits either - even  
>> leaving aside the question of how stoned he is most of the time.
>>
>>
>>