GR, domination and freedom

[Monte Davis]

The context is a discussion  of how GR "mock[s] the interpretive effort"
(p. 11) and denies neat denouements; "Refusing endings is consistent
aesthetically and politically with the compositional process of
superaddition" (12).

I read the sentence you quote as arguing that one of GR's central
"subjects" -- state capitalism's constantly evolving need for new markets,
new funding sources for innovation, etc. -- provides an additional reason,
beyond aesthetics and politics, for all the overlapping and even
conflicting "explanations" the book offers, piled atop each other in
profusion (i.e. superadded).

There's a parallel argument on pp. 170-172, pinned to Pynchon's
often-quoted "You will want cause and effect. All right."

"Conventional third-person real­ist fictions structure authority top-down.
Typically, the omniscient narrator who speaks from without and focalizes
through characters has more force and truth value than the characters
themselves. And as we've said, in conventional third-person mode, these
figures—narrators and characters, and one or some of their minds—occupy
different orders of being or ontological frames that shall not overlap.
Pynchon repeatedly bends and breaches the frames, which is why narrative
theorists reach into Pynchon's novel for examples. What has most interested
them are the ways Pynchon's narration seems to put third-person narrative
authority under attack (if not deconstructionist “erasure”). Critics have
noted how the narrator (narrators?) will make and then debunk a claim,
leaving unresolved “whether it is the narrator or its audience that is
being fooled” or otherwise manipulated. Equally disruptive to narrative
au­thority are the ways that the narrator(s) will trot out
pseudo-experts—figures such as film specialist Mitchell Prettyplace, Mickey
Wuxtry-Wuxtry, an un­named “spokesman for the Counterforce,” and Steve
Edelman—who speak from within the storyworld yet also from positions equal
(or superior?) to that of our (no longer?) omniscient narrator."



On Fri, Jul 18, 2014 at 9:59 AM, Elisabeth Romberg <eromberg at mac.com> wrote:

> Anyone else reading or have read the book by Herman and Weisenburger? Or
> might be able to help anyway?
>
> There is a sentence on page 13 that I have difficulties following (near
> the top):
>
> "Certainly the ceaseless, ever-morphing needs of a corporatized
> military-industrial management and production regime also shadow this great
> novel from beginning to end - an alternate mimetic reason for the rhetoric
> of superaddition"
>
> It is the second half of the sentence I don't understand the meaning of.
> In particular the word superaddition and what it means in the context of
> the sentence.
>
>
> Elisabeth
>
> Sendt fra min iPhone
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
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