M&D Deep Duck 7-9: Why doesn't Mason sleep with Austra?

Thu Feb 5 22:19:46 CST 2015

In terms of storytelling, there is no difference between story and history.
Facts and factoids jump into story-telling. With Pynchon always everything
is OK.  TeeVee, movies, cartoons, Sears catalog. All sources of modern logo.

On Thursday, February 5, 2015, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net> wrote:

> I just don't find these lines between fiction and history to be so
> impermeable. All Quiet on the Western Front is as much history from the
> inside parading as fiction as it is fiction imitating history. Anne Frank
> wrote a diary that aspired to be a novel.  There is so much that is like
> that. Cherrycoke is purely invented, but he can in some sense only tell the
> truth  since he is telling the story we are partaking of. There is no other
> story to be had in this book. But his unreliability makes clear that there
> must be other points of view, and likely more accurate. The inner life of
> Mason is invented with care toward  plausibility shaped by  known events
> and personal letters. His core actions are as real and quite the same in a
> fictional work as they would be in a biography. There was a real Mason and
> a real Dixon whose lives bears all levels of consideration.
>     We are mostly all saying similar things differently.  Cherrycoke is a
> character in the story who allows Pychon to be as colorful as he wishes,
> but Pynchon woulda done tha anyway.
>
>
> On Feb 5, 2015, at 9:29 PM, Becky Lindroos wrote:
>
> > Absolutely,  David.   The term “reliable” is problem enough in serious
> fiction,  so I sure don’t understand trying to apply it to historiographic
> metafiction of a very humorous variety.
> >
> > About the history - this is fiction!  If I don’t know a thing to be
> generally accepted as history - that is, documented, verified, etc. then I
> expect it’s fiction.   I look a LOT of stuff up when I read historical
> fiction - if it turns out to be generally true then kudos to the author and
> his research.  If it turns out not to be true but works in terms of the
> novel then I applaud the author’s imagination.  And I also ask why he wrote
> it that way.  This is not a rhetorical question,  I’m  serious in wanting
> to find out.  In Pynchon’s case I think Cherrycoke is obviously a
> fictitious character - why is he presented as unreliable?  I’d say it’s
> because Pynchon is showing that history, as we receive it, is not
> particularly reliable. The outline may be generally accurate in terms of
> reporting events but everything else is suspect to interpretation,
> revisionism, over-interpretation,  etc.
> >
> > In what way is Cherrycoke unreliable?  Is he insane (like Benji of The
> Sound and the Fury)? Is he being deliberately deceitful (like the Briony in
> Ian McEwan’s Atonement)?  Is he a child (like the kid in Emma Donahue’s
> Room)?  Many others who range between the drunks, the aged, the insane and
> the criminal - between naive and deliberate.
> >
> > With Cherrycoke it’s hard telling - he’s a jokester at heart and he
> loves the attention of the audience - he exaggerates,  tells tall tales,
> just goes with the flow of a good story.  lol -
> >
> > Becky
> >
> >
> >> On Feb 5, 2015, at 8:49 AM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >>
> >> I think the task of trying to establish or bash a character's or
> narrator's reliability in this novel, MD, is an utterly futile task.  It
> will only result in discounting everything that the author has written.
> >>
> >> David Morris
> >>
> >> On Thu, Feb 5, 2015 at 10:46 AM, Joseph Tracy <brook7 at sover.net
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >> Isn't there an implied difference between Cherrycoke's  youthful post
> revolutionary audience who might not question how he knows this shit and
> the more canny post-modern readers.  Which of these audiences might get the
> real import is up for grabs. But the fact that the narrative portrays
> historical figures gives Pynchon's assertion of fictional freedom
> negotiated through Cherrycoke less encumbrance.   Pynchon cares about
> history deeply and though he uses it for satire he seems also  to want to
> catch us by surprise with historical realities often glossed over or found
> only in the fine print. These devices tell us he is conscious of narrative
> issues but allows us to enjoy the ride.
> >> The " think of it like a movie" take seems good advice.
> >>
> >> 9 AM, Mark Kohut wrote:
> >>
> >>> Agree with Morris, Becky, terrif guidepost. Thanks.
> >>>
> >>> Becky writes: "I think  Cherrycoke is *understood* (by the reader)  to
> >>> be telling the story to his audience but that's in the background of
> >>> the omniscient narrator parts and he's using his own words back there
> >>> with the kids,  not the words we're reading in the less personal (I,
> >>> us, we)  sections of the narrative.  Cherrycoke introduces a vision or
> >>> something - a flashback,  but the omniscient narrator is there at the
> >>> scene."
> >>>
> >>> I would say that this paragraph of yours is how I think I have been
> >>> reading it. Once Cherrycoke became the frame narrator, I presumed he
> >>> SOMEHOW told the whole story, Pynchon-cagy-like IN some scenes,
> >>> witnessing some scenes he could not have---told to him, if we want to
> >>> pin down how; and for some of the stories that Mason might never tell
> >>> the Reverend, I believe he would, ultimately, after their long
> >>> intimacy, have told Dixon who would recount. That Cherrycoke SOMEHOW
> >>> (part of Pynchon"s magic realism?, so to speak, along with Talking
> >>> Dogs, etc.)) tells the whole story is needed, it seems to me, to
> >>> explain how the Rev's audience would even get a 'whole story'. See p.
> >>> 75, where the Rev comes back to say, "Even by then", etc...implying,
> >>> yes, that he has told his audience of the preceding 'objective'
> >>> omnisciently seen Astronomy stuff at least. And the preceding risqué
> >>> stuff, per Jochen's challenge? Seems so to me.
> >>>
> >>> Here is more words on omniscient fictional narration than most want to
> >>> read: "Certain third-person omniscient modes are also classifiable as
> >>> "third person, subjective" modes that switch between the thoughts,
> >>> feelings, etc. of all the characters.This style, in both its limited
> >>> and omniscient variants, became the most popular narrative perspective
> >>> during the 20th century. In contrast to the broad, sweeping
> >>> perspectives seen in many 19th-century novels, third-person subjective
> >>> is sometimes called the "over the shoulder" perspective;
> >>>
> >>> "The third-person omniscient narrator is the least capable of being
> >>> unreliable--although the omniscient narrator can have its own
> >>> personality, offering judgments and opinions on the behavior of the
> >>> characters.
> >>> In addition to reinforcing the sense of the narrator as reliable (and
> >>> thus of the story as true), the main advantage of this mode is that it
> >>> is eminently suited to telling huge, sweeping, epic stories, and/or
> >>> complicated stories involving numerous characters."
> >>>
> >>> But, I do think Jochen is right on my lazy remark that because
> >>> Cherrycoke is an unreliable narrator, Austra's story is therefore
> >>> unreliable. No therefore at all. Jochen, and you and Laura and others
> >>> have to be right about some distinction between Cherrycoke's
> >>> self-confessed unreliability and Pynchon's historical reality. He has
> >>> to, as Jochen repeats---but I'd love him to make the case with
> >>> examples---be writing a real historical novel (of some kind) or else
> >>> there is no ground to his vision, no history there (allusion to: "no
> >>> there there").
> >>>
> >>> I think that his vision IS contained in the writing that is that
> >>> third-person omniscient narrator but often Not in the events but in
> >>> the prose, the subtexts, the intellectual notions embodied in reasons
> >>> behind the scenes, the words of those scenes, etc.(and his framings
> >>> and unreliabilities hold that vision too. Like an Ampersand)
> >>>
> >>> With talking dogs, mechanical ducks, other things, we cannot be in a
> >>> usual historical novel, right?
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 10:52 PM, David Morris <fqmorris at gmail.com
> <javascript:;>> wrote:
> >>>> "Think of it like a movie."
> >>>>
> >>>> Better Pynchon advice could not be had!
> >>>>
> >>>> DM
> >>> -
> >>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
> >>
> >> -
> >> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
> >>
> >
> > -
> > Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list
>
> -
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>
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