BE Spoiler (if that's possible now)

[Fiona Shnapple]

In case of emergency call 911.

In the subway and bus system, in Penn Station, Times Square, Grand
Central, JFK, LaGuardia, at baseball, football, hockey games, in
schools, in restaurants, in the libraries...in public and private
spaces ...etc.,, still today, the tourists, commuters, residents are
constantly reminded, by a robot recording to keep their snitch switch
on, to be on guard for suspicious people and packages. It's crazier
than Crazy Eddie's commercials, it's message is Insane.

You can buy Ground Zero hats and 911 T-shirts and bumper stickers that
support the Patriot Act. You can get  cabby in a jam by alerting a cop
that he looks like he might have something under his turban. And
people do.

It's disgusting. And that is hat 911 means to me.

The atrocity of September 11, and btw, I have always favored this
method of writing a date (Elements of Style), is an improvement if
only because the media and the maniacs don't use it. Those who claim
that day, that history, that Truth, as Wicks, a brilliantly employed
mouthpiece in this particular passage says, abandon it:

 "Who claims Truth, Truth abandons. History is hir'd, or coerc'd, only
in Interests that must ever prove base. She is too innocent, to be
left within the reach of anyone in Power, -- who need but touch her,
and all her Credit is in the instant vanish'd, as if it had never
been. She needs rather to be tended lovingly and honorably by
fabulists and counterfeiters, Ballad-Mongers and Cranks of ev'ry
Radius, Masters of Disguise to provide her the Costume, Toilette, and
Bearing, and Speech nimble enough to keep her beyond the Desires, or
even the Curiosity, of Government."
--Mason & Dixon, Chapter 35, pg. 350

In M&D, a work I grow finder of each time I dip into it, the
mouthpiece, a common narrative strategy of the day is used
brilliantly, but here, in BE we have no mouthpiece because it's not an
option. So how does P get the facts to us? He can't give these to us
from an character we've met. All of the characters are subjected to
P's irony, so the reliability he seeks here can't be conveyed with a
character. Also, he wants to make clear the distance, the authorial
distance between his norms and those of Maxine, March, the Old
Lefties, etc.

Now, for whatever reason we have come to distrust and dislike these
authorial commentaries. Post Henry James they have been rejected by
sophisticated readers and critics. But that's a rather foolish way to
proceed because most of the great literature before James makes use of
commentary. Sometimes, it's simply the best method. So why condemn it?
There is nothing wrong with P's stepping onto the sage and telling us,
in his own voice, the one we recognize from his SL and other prose
pieces, the facts of the atrocity. Moreover, P wants, not to diminish
the dead, or the atrocity, but to counter, discredit the disgusting
and dishonorable time and space, 911, ground zero, and so he pulls it
from the drama, that would, of course, heighten it. He does not omit
it or relegate it to a non-event, compare or contrast it with other
events, as we see in V., with the Six Million, and in GR with Dora and
so forth, but through the juxtaposition of the screed he writes here
with the comic drama, he has his say, no ambiguity, no mirrors, no
smoke, no tricks or cute self-consciousness.


And so, as Robin said, though he is there throughout the narrative,
all other commentary is but the beating of his tell tale heart; here
we see his face.

On Sat, Nov 16, 2013 at 8:17 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com> wrote:
> 9-11 isn't a cliche, it's a convention, just like 24/7.  11 September is
> just a bit cumbersome.
>
>
> On Saturday, November 16, 2013, jochen stremmel wrote:
>>
>> >Any idea why he goes 11 September vs 9-11?<
>>
>> 1) Because he has 24/7 in the sentence before.
>>
>> 2) Because he regards 9-11 as a cliché, similar to "Ground Zero"?
>>
>>
>> 2013/11/16 David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com>:
>> > And Most Importantly, we are not told what to think. We are told what
>> > current thoughts are happening, without taking sides.
>> >
>> >
>> > On Friday, November 15, 2013, David Morris wrote:
>> >>>
>> >>> BUT perhaps it's entirely appropriate (and deliberate) that this
>> >>> abrupt
>> >>> and STRIKING shift in voice occurs when it does. The novel's
>> >>> form reflecting the atrocity itself, subjecting the reader to a kind
>> >>> of
>> >>> authorial violence (we are suddenly told what to think of all this)
>> >>
>> >>
>> >> Wow! & What?  Violence via tone shift?
>> >>
>> >> I agree that those three paragraphs read like an essay. P surely knows
>> >> what he did here in this most central point of his 11-9 novel.  It is
>> >> admission of ignorance as much as an asking of forgiveness for
>> >> paranoia.
>> >> But not a complete retreat.  The Paper of Record is a stand-in for
>> >> blind
>> >> consumerism info, his common refrain.
>> >>
>> >> Any idea why he goes 11 September vs 9-11?
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l