V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone

[alice wellintown]

Tone is probably a better term to use when discussing non-fiction
prose. Like, what is Pynchon's tone in the Luddute essay or in the
Introduction to 1984 and so on...how does he establish and maintain
this attitude and how does the subject, occasion (it being 1984 or the
anniversary of Orwell's novel or birth or whatever), audience,
purpose, voice and tone (SOAPStone) influence the rhetorical success
or failure of the piece. That is, as Wayne C. Booth notes, tone is an
older term, not as useful when the work under consideration is a prose
fiction, and less so when the work is modern. So distance and irony
and norms (implied author) and morals are applied to prevent the kinds
of confusion modern authors often deliberately and quite often without
knowing it cause with the modern techniques they employ. It seems a
waste of time to tell young Pynchon what he could have done better or
how his techniques sometimes trip over one another--I'm sure at this
point he has gotten over it and discovered that his Murphy's Law and
his Law of the Excluded Middle are sometimes defeated by the
principals of non-contradiction and the Law of Diminishing Return. The
Biographical approach may prime a pump or swell a progress or two, but
the parade of characters can never march down some thoroughfare into a
theatre managed by The House of Pynchon. The Estate, as James Wood so
aptly put it, is Melville's, and Pynchon its inheritor, must work with
a spilled and broken world. Fortune's wheel turns; Melville's
Romances, _The Ambiguities_, and _The Whale_, were reviewed with
savage and bloody fangs,  Pynchon's with hungry eyes and sophistic
sentimentalism.