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

[Markekohut]

Poulet on time.

I cannot agree w ahistorical. 

Endings of maybe all novels after V.  " bring it all home" don ' t they? And V. Seems meant to stop.

I read that Steiner too, young like you, and it was very famous and again I wonder if TRP did....but prob not and might only be true thru GR......

Re P and paranoia...."paranoia runs deep, into your life it will creep".   As, who, Buffalo Springfield sang while TRP was writing GR......he felt it hard, I say........it closed the endless recursive ness he coulda been caught in...




B

Sent from my iPad

On Oct 3, 2012, at 1:55 AM, Prashant Kumar <siva.prashant.kumar at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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