V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone

[alice wellintown]

When I say he is an unreliable narrator I am not talking about the
facts or the events that he narrates or even the themes. He is an
excellent and reliable source of all of these, perhaps the best
narrator thus far if we want to understand the facts of history and
V's process (Eddins cited by Grant). However, the text and the implied
author insist that Fausto is unreliable; he is subjected to Pynchon's
irony. What comes out of his mouth has a double and often an opposite
meaning that he doesn't understand. We do. This is what I mean by
unreliable. Though Fausto, like Stencil and Adams, aware that first
person Confession is inherently limited, subjective, unreliable,
attempts to escape its limits and unreliability, he can not. His
Confessions are rationalizations, attempts to purge or escape by
confessing, but the text, the implied author, with ironic meanings,
subverts his attempt.

On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 1:31 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> I say we do have a basically reliable confession. (Where we might be in doubt
> are the same places Fausto IS in doubt!...as he doubts some history, and his own
> continuous identity)
>            A) All the vision stuff on Malta, matriarchy, etc...is very Pynchon,
> no?
>            B) As a perspective on V., we get facts, events, stories.....IF
> Fausto is
> unreliable, then so are the V. stories...................
>
>
>
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
> Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 12:56:26 PM
> Subject: Re: V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone
>
> Do we have a relaible Confession here? Why has P compromised its
> reliability as he has with other Confessions, with several other
> nattatives,  if we are to read this one as sincere apology, as honest
> and faithful?
>
> Why does P draw the obvious parallel with the Stencilized narrative,
> with Henry Adams's Education, if we are expected to learn the facts or
> the truth from Fausto?
>
> Also, while Fausto characterizes Paola's mother as, "your poor
> mother" and Fausto I as a poet, something we can accept because he is
> drawing the relationships and the history for his daughter, his
> comments about the art of writing a Confession, the pickle a living
> young man is put in as he attempts to write a biography that is yet to
> lived...and so on from that Preface to Adams's Education and on into
> three of the most famous example in the genre, are commentary by the
> implied author. So, a distance, an ironic distance is established
> here. This is one reason I find the biographical readings quite
> limited. That young P was an aspiring poet or man of the cloth and
> turned to making rockets is all very fine to fill in the chinks, but
> the armor is built of prose not scraps of biography. Can Paola
> appreciate that quip about anti-climatic youth is wasted on the
> apologia of a man who hasn't had a chance to sin? I doubt it. That bit
> is for us.
>
> On Sun, Nov 21, 2010 at 12:30 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>> Okay...I'll go with this basically but still say, simply, after
>> Laura and Michael that as a chapter of confession
>> the voice (tone) is more intimate than most other chapters
>> and,a s a confession, the declarer's tone is one of guilt--
>> or keen regret as Kaufman interpreted Nietzsche of No-Guilt fame..
>>
>>
>> ----- Original Message ----
>> From: alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com>
>> To: pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org>
>> Sent: Sun, November 21, 2010 10:06:44 AM
>> Subject: Re: V2nd - Chapter 11 - the tone
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
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