Time in Fiction and Narrative....but wait! There's more!

[Prashant Kumar]

Anyone know of any good studies on time in fiction? Counting physical,
psychological and Proustian.

As an aside, I've been thinking recently about the nature of paranoia in
early Pynchon. Friend of mine is doing his thesis on Proust via Lacan, and
I've noticed in conversation how the Lacanian notion of the "desired
object" is quite nicely applicable to V. In this sort of framework, one
could see paranoia something engendered by the dislocation of the desired
object, and a necessary consequence of the search that results. An attempt
to reify and instantiate some lack, a hole? Occurs to me that this may also
work in CoL49. Want to know what continentalists think of this.

I've said before that I view Pynchon as a perfect charlatan, and I've
always viewed the paranoia as resulting from his particular approach, sort
of ahistorical, a bricolage, juxtaposing everything and implying
connections -- those implied  in turn implying and soon you're off -- but
I'm wondering now if this is just a corollary of Pynchonian narrative being
funamentally a quest. Question then becomes: what, if anything, is the
telos? Maybe there is none; more than one critic I've read has noted that
(and I don't think this applies to later P to the same extent) Pynchon's
novels don't end, they stop.

There's a passage in Language and Silence (Steiner):

"...grounded in historical circumstance, in a late stage of linguistic and
formal civilization in which the expressive achievements of the past seem
to weigh exhaustively on the possibilities of the present, in which word
and genre seem trivial"

The context here is (suggestively) a discussion of the metafictionists as
inheritors of the minimalist late modernism of Beckett.

Wondering what y'all think of this notion of "the oppression of the past"
(which I think is a charmingly coloured phrase).


Prashant
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