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

[Robin Landseadel]

On Sep 8, 2010, at 8:16 PM, Dave Williams wrote:

> 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.

Surprise, surprise - - I agree with you!

	Stencil toured one plant out on Long Island. Among instruments
	of war, he reasoned, some clue to the cabal might show up. It
	did. He'd wandered into a region of offices, drafting boards,
	blueprint files. Soon Stencil discovered, sitting half hidden in a
	forest of file cabinets, and sipping occasionally at the coffee in a
	paper cup which for today's engineer is practically uniform-
	of-the-day, a balding and porcine gentleman in a suit of
	European cut. The engineer's name was Kurt Mondaugen, he
	had worked, yes, at Peenemunde, developing
	Vergeltungswaffe Eins and Zwei. The magic initial! Soon the
	afternoon had gone and Stencil had made an appointment to
	renew the conversation.

	A week or so later, in one of the secluded side rooms of the
	Rusty Spoon, Mondaugen yarned, over an abominable
	imitation of Munich beer, about youthful days in South-West 	
	Africa.

	Stencil listened attentively. The tale proper and the questioning
	after took no more than thirty minutes. Yet the next Wednesday
	afternoon at Eigenvalue's office, when Stencil retold it, the yarn
	had undergone considerable change: had become, as
	Eigenvalue put it, Stencilized.

	V, page 241

One strange theory -- yours to embrace or reject at will -- is the  
notion that Benny & Stencil are the Narcissus and Goldmund, twin and  
opposing halves of the author, the severed self standing in for the  
author's voice.

But yes, the unreliability of Pynchon's narrators is part and parcel  
of their status as Satirical characters. This is particularly notable  
in Mason & Dixon, where the Rvd. Wicks Cherrycoke's need to entertain  
drives and warps the story.