V-2nd C3

[alice wellintown]

Kelber at mindspring.com> wrote:
> Stencil's "forcible dislocation of personality" seems a precursor to Pirate Prentice's "gift" (in GR) of acting as a "fantasist-surrogate," or channeler of other people's dreams.  In GR, this is presented as a mystical ability (and therefore co-optable by the War Office).  But in the earlier V. it's merely a writer's technique.  Stencil's quick changes are Pynchon's quick changes.  The thrill of being a writer (or, alas, for some of us, wanna-be writer) is to completely immerse oneself in another person's situation and mentality.  Young Pynchon has the fun of creating characters out of the "automata" provided by Baedeker's.  Each character (Aieul, Yusef, Maxwell/Ralph, Waldetar, Gebrail, Girgis, and Hanne)of Pynchon's/Stencil's is a working person or indigent, a mere prop for tourists.

I agree that stencil is a precursor to narrative techniques P develops
and employs with great skill in later works, including GR, M&D, AGTD,
but I don't agree that Stencil is a precursor to Pirate. Stencil and
the Baedeker owe a great debt to Nabokov, who, when he came to the
United States, had to create a new fictional landscape or setting and
found it rough going. Lolita is the result of Nabokov's baedeker
method. The Baedeker is also used by Fitzgerald and, as I noted in a
prior post, the Baedeker girls are on Nick's list of decadent party
people who frequent Gatsby's siege parties. P spent a great deal of
time reading and re-reading Fitzgerald. Fitzgerald, of course, was
profoundly influenced by a Catholic priest who turned him on to Marx
and to Adams. But back to the narrative technic. The dreaming a yearn
narrative is quite old and not that inovative, so Pirate has quite a
few precursors, like the long chapter in Melville's Moby-Dick, The
Town Ho's story, a tale in the tradition of gossip or telephone it's
difficult to trace because it has changed hands so many time and
because most of it was taken from a man talking in his sleep. Of
course, this technic is used by P again and again, narrators like
Mason spin yarns while sleeping that are apparently the hauntings of
Native Americans, for much of what Mason tells in his sleep is in an
Native American language he neither speaks nor comprehends. In any
event, Pirate's dream, while it may be another person's as well, is
not the stuff that Stencil is made on. Stencil is a parodic Adams.

>
> Stencil is trying to get a view of V. by immersing himself mentally in her world.  She barely appears in some or most of these vignettes (assuming Victoria Wren to be her earliest incarnation).  It's not important.  What is important is that Stencil's trying to "get" the mentality of a time and place that might have created the who/what of the V. he's pursuing.

Yes, I agree with this. And, of course, this is all Henry Adams does
for 500 pages.

 In doing so, he's copying Pynchon, who's reading the flat descriptive
prose of a travel guide as a starting point for creating a (lush, he
hopes)fictional world.

The self-consciousness of P is parallel to Adams's self-consciousness.
P, like Shakespeare, since Mark brought him into this, lets the reader
know that there is a play within a play and that all the world's a
stage and men but players. Poor players? Macbeth might say so. The
bastard in Lear might claim that his part is too restrictive and he
might bite his thumb at the playwrite, while Bottom might make every
part a fool. Hamlet may give directions to professional actors only if
he speaks as SHakespeare's mouthpiece and he may hold a bare bodkin or
a skull only if the grave and serious art of tragedy purges when the
curtain falls and the spell of Prespero is lifted. Shakespeare made
all manner of persona for the stage, a good many do not suck air or
eat at the table, but this lack of emotional involvement or
identification or whatever, makes them nonetheless brilliant.


>
> As Mark's pointed out in a previous post, Pynchon's unsuccessful (unlike Shakespeare) in animating his minor, and even major, characters.  They remain Baedeker automata, there for our entertainment, but emotionally uninvolving.
>
> Laura (trying to catch up)
>
> -----Original Message-----
>>From: Ian Livingston <igrlivingston at gmail.com>
> Holy smokes that’s a long address!)
>>
>>We learn, similarly, that Herbert's is a mere pastiche of sleuthing
>>and that it is more important that he is Stencil, than it is that he
>>bears some superficial resemblance to Henry Adams. His use of the
>>third person is neither out of a an affected self-reflexion, nor a
>>pretension to royal superiority, but a "forcible dislocation of
>>personality"(62), and even this is apparently meaningless. Of course,
>>there are hazards to too readily dismissing any reference Pynchon
>>offers. I think it is safe to say that if he refers or alludes to it,
>>he likely read it, and it can likely, then, be counted as an influence
>>on his work. The degree of that influence is open at all times for
>>debate.
>