BEER Ch. 6, 57-61: Reg reports in

Fiona Shnapple fionashnapple at gmail.com
Tue Oct 29 18:33:05 CDT 2013


Mark, my point, or rather Booth's point is that the old tool of
critics, person, first person, third person, is fairly useless and
that point of view is as well because fiction making  is so very
complex in modern and late modern or postmodern texts. What Wood does
is to lift several big ideas from Booth, explain them with his own
examples, using some more recent works. Wood's prose is, believe it or
not, not so stodgy or difficult next to Booth's. But the ideas are,
now standard, Booth's ideas. Wood uses some new and fresh examples and
some terms that make great sense. He uses, for example, the word
register. In his examples, the best one is from Roth, we can see how a
single word, one that sticks out, or jars us into thoughts about who
is saying or thinking this, can make a passage an outstanding one.

In any event, Pynchon, as Monte has shown with a few examples, doesn't
always want us to know, for sure, who is thinking or speaking.

Does it matter (Foucault, Beckett?)



On Tue, Oct 29, 2013 at 7:09 PM, Mark Kohut <markekohut at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Well, pace' ol John Wayne Booth, but pov has to tell us some things. James
> Wayne Wood sez so. Jean-Paul Sartre
> said a writer could not have an omniscient narrator (anymore), like
> believing Catholic Francois Mauriac did, if god
> was dead to him.
>
> my comedy remark was virtually stolen from the COMEDY short introduction
> guy.....and applied to Pynchon. Comedies' voices can be all over;
> non-comedies, seldom. And, for effect, tragedies build linearly---single up
> them emotions, the catharsis train is riding...
>
>
> On Sunday, October 27, 2013 1:17 PM, Fiona Shnapple
> <fionashnapple at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Pov, as Booth taught us long ago, tells us nothing, really. Narrative is so
> very complex, it is, rhetorical, meaning, everything an author does, puts on
> the page, to evoke a response. And the old rhetorical triangle functions,
> the shifts are given cues and markers, only they are not tagged but are far
> more dependent on an active reader who can identify the style shifts, by
> listening to the language, the diction, the arrangements. So, like Maxine
> sniffs out the code switching, as more Anglo in named businesses and
> business names, she also notes the language code switches to and away from
> more Anglo speak. When the lights shift or dim, change color or shade, a
> prop is rolled in or out, a word, a dot on the page, these are the cues and
> language flows we are tuned into. Or we toss the book, walk out of the
> theater.
> On Sunday, October 27, 2013, Monte Davis wrote:
>
> MK> P's jump cuts, like tonal switches in classic dramatic comedy, imply the
> non-linear in a way most
> tragedies or even tragicomedies do not
>
> I was highlighting not the non-linearity (nested flashbacks are old and
> common in all narrative genres) but the absence of  cues to mark the
> transition from Maxine and Reg now, with a quick dip into Maxine’s mind
> (“’..he’s so paranoid,’ yeah, Reg, ‘he only likes to meet face-to-face on
> the subway’”)
>
> …to Reg and Eric at an earlier moment on that subway. No line break, no
> “Today [they had met as] an insane white Christer at one end of the car
> was…” I was thinking stylistic, not thematic.
>
> Not a big deal. Having been enlightened recently about the simple,
> straightforward third-person narration in GR, I now see that I never
> understood the basics of POV in forty years of professional writing, editing
> and English teaching. So when I go off about what I find to be interesting
> tricks in P’s voice, consider it just my own eccentric hobbyhorse. J
>
>
>
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