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

[Fiona Shnapple]

In the end, Wood says, "the novel teaches us how to read its narrator"
(5). And, that style draws us toward the writer(6). And, that with
free indirect speech the writer inflects reported thought, bends it
around characters (9).  Here Wood is saying, in condensed and simpler
language what Booth said in TRF. Booth says, the author may choose a
disguise but can not choose to disappear. Wood says that so-called
omniscience is almost impossible. He quotes Barth's S/Z on "cultural
code", and, again, this is nothing more than a simplified Booth--what
Booth calls the authorial norms. So, commonly accepted or generally
excepted cultural values. Of course, much of our attempt to read
Pynchon is about how his style draws us toward him as he wraps
inflects thoughts and ideas about his characters. We often find
ourselves fixated on a single word, like "legend" because the narrator
seems to invite, no,  instruct us to read with our dictionaries, with
our Google Machines, to make plots into conspiracy. And, although we
know that close reading is a very conservative or traditional
approach, that it sets us up to read with traditional expectations,
and that the narrator only seems to instructs us in this method, we
keep at it, a modern reader in the zones of postmoderism, treating
characters like characters flat or round or whatever, settings of time
and space  Newtonian, reading as if we are still at the movies and TV
and rich media have not yet been invented, saturated our lives or the
lives of the characters we try to unravel in order to discover that
one word that seems out of place and must belong, by some cause and
effect, to the author.
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Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l