Gold, Man, Sax and Violins CH 6 V-2

[Dave Williams]

I tell tall stories to girls I want to
> screw, Profane thought. He
> > scratched his armpit. "Kill alligators," he said.
> >        "Wha."
> >            He told her about the alligators;
> Angel, who had a fertile
> > imagination too, added detail, color. Together on the
> stoop they hammered
> >              together a myth. "
> >
> 
> wow, never noticed that!


Oh, that is rather important. One of the topics we've ignored here, and the recent sexual scenes discussion can't make any sense unless this is taken into account, is the complexity of the narrative here in V. and the super-complex narrative techniques P employs after V.. Who is telling the tale? Why? How is the tale a mixture of dream, fantasy, rumor, madness, drug induced hallucination...? 

A lot has been said about the bad ears and eyes of young P and so on, and I've tried to argue that young P's genius is, in part, and perhaps much to the chagrin of his Cornell Porfessor, his ability to work with ideas (Adams & Co.), but it's also his narrative experimentation that are quite brilliant. I've used the term "parody" a lot. And I know it's not the best term; a better term is "stylization", and, this is the term MChale uses in his _Postmodernist Fiction (see pp. 21-22). Mchale claims, and I think he's right, that V. is a stylization of Modernist Fiction. 

For those who won't mind these splitting-hair-arguments about literary terms and the application of said terms to analysis, the text is on line.

 But the argument about what "romance" is or means or about parody and stylization needn't get in the way. 

The point McHale makes, and he does a better job of this in _Constructing Postmodernism_, is that Pynchon is constantly blowing up, to gargantuan size, Modernist narrative techniques and experiments. So, we get Stencil's dislocations and impersonations and we get Mondaugen's Story third hand and its "truth" or its factual or historical accuracy can not be confirmed. The narrative constantly complicates the tales by complicating the narrator or who is telling the tale and where he got it from and what he did with it or what he may be  doing with it as we get to hear or read it, or as someone performs it for an audience and we stand outside without a ticket and try to imagine what is going on.

 Conrad, James, Joyce, Woolf...Modernists, but this kind of stuff is the very heart of American Romance. The longest chapter in Melville's M-D, for example, "The Town Ho's Story", is told by a narrator who got it third hand by listening in on a man's sleep-talking. The tale was a short story Melville wedged into M-D. AMerican Romance is haunted; it's gothic. It is haunted by the sins of Ahab (book of kings 1:1-29) or Pyncheon. That is, accuse a people of withcraft, exterminate them, take their land & slavery. 

Mason, of Mason & Dixon, is haunted by the Indians and he talks in his sleep in a language he doesn't even know. 

The hauntings, can be as frightening as Morrison's Beloved or as beautiful as Morrison's Flying African.  or as friendly as Boo (aka, Arthur) Radley or a dead as Emily's Yankee husband (Faulkner), and they can be heard, if you listen to Jazz you may hear the strange fruit or the middle passage.