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

[Bled Welder]

For example, a timely example: how do you know that Proust wasn't some type
of higher order of consciousness or intelligence and that all of
Remembrance is nothing but an enormous coded technique that hypnotizes the
greater human intelligences who read it?

How about Cat in the Hat?  How do you know but that the entire Dr. Seuss
literary structure is not a grand device to program and hypnotize humans
away from the truth that is right in front of their eyes?

On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 4:10 PM, Bled Welder <bledwelder at gmail.com> wrote:

> I've been thinking about paranoia too.  Oh, for a while now.  Not sure how
> recent it's been.  How do we know right now that we are not hypnotized?
>
> How how long, for how much time have you been hypnotized?
>
> This assumes of course we ever are not, have ever not been, are capable of
> being otherwise.
>
> I'm wondering if the truth may be hidden in clear daylight.  And I don't
> mean the hypnotized nards who know nothing and watch bad television all
> day.  I mean even the people who are highly educated and read all day, and
> even seriously contemplate what they read, and comparatively.  We,
> hypnotized.  Thankfully the nature of such thinking is that it is utterly
> pointless: why wonder if I'm hypnotized or not.  I must not be, because if
> I am, then I wouldn't wonder about it.  and if I could somehow snap myself
> out of it, there's no possible way for me to snap anyone else out of it.  I
> don't know the code word.  It's not "Sirius", obviously--I already tried
> that....it's not "front right tooth"....what do I do, just open a
> dictionary and start calling out words?  Seeing how I'm hypnotized, I'd
> obviously choose all the wrong words to call out.
>
> On Tue, Oct 2, 2012 at 10:55 PM, 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
>>
>
>
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