M&D preambulatory profferings

[Mark Kohut]

Exploring that META:

Rev Cherrycoke is a self-described unreliable narrator. Among other
things in the best fictions, it means that the teller, he as narrator
misses, fails to see (some) reality that matters, is blinded to it
because of something in his character/being. (see The Good Soldier,
Remains of the Day, lotsa others)

The Rev: 'After years wasted at perfecting a parsonical disguise',
grown old in the service of an Impersonation that never took more than
a Handful of actor's tricks"......

Whoa.....is he or isn't he a...religious minister? How did Laura
characterize him?, another P outcast, a heretic (or more than)--like
P's ancestor? If he stands for the artist P himself, wha?


On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 9:22 PM, Becky Lindroos <bekker2 at icloud.com> wrote:
> It's usually called historiographic metafiction, a kind of postmodern lit, and as such uses textual play like language and structure in addition to parody and revisionist ideas re history.    Linda Hutcheon wrote about it in the 1980s,  prior to Mason & Dixon, but she mentions V. and The Crying of Lot 49.
>
> From Hutcheon's Historiographic Metafiction:   Parody and the Intertextuality of History
>
> "Historiographic metafiction appears willing to draw upon any signifying practices it can find operative in a society. It wants to challenge those discourses and yet to milk them for all they are worth. In Pynchon's fiction, for instance, this kind of contradictory subversive inscribing is often carried to an extreme: "Documenta- tion, obsessional systems, the languages of popular culture, of ad- vertising: hundreds of systems compete with each other, resisting assimilation to anyone received paradigm" (Waugh 39)."
> https://tspace.library.utoronto.ca/bitstream/1807/10252/1/TSpace0167.pdf
>
> So the answer to your question,  "Who is holding the views that Pynchon is subverting?"  might be everyone's - probably more so in the 1990s.  (Historians hated make-believe historical fiction for a long, long time - lit critics hated it for even longer.)   How and where he is doing his subversion is another question,  worthy of volumes.
>
> Pynchon is certainly not subverting the views of the colonists, etc.  He's subverting the long-established and nation-building ideas most folks who have "learned" their formal lessons at all have about them (or had in 1997).  He's just tossing those ideas around and giving them a little spin without any respect - or maybe with enormous respect - a new respect based on no lines - singled up (AtD), surveyed (M&W), ended (GR) or otherwise.
>
> Of course he's writing for those folks who are open and ready to receive those "revisionist" and historiographical and metafictional ideas -  probably not for the Texas schools text book committee.
>
> Bek
>
>> On Jan 5, 2015, at 2:10 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> An excellent discussion on this topic all round.
>>>
>>> A question: if Pynchon is subverting the  historical and political
>>> notions of belonging, who holds the notions he subverts?
>>
>> Are these the notions of a reader? One who has notions about history
>> and politics that are too simple, not Pynchon's,  in need of
>> correction? What? Are the notions the reader has created by the
>> narrative? In other words, does Pynchon subvert these notions to make
>> fun of his readers? To subvert is a tool of the satirists. No? Why
>> would he subvert these notions, many of them given to or hinted at by
>> the text? Or by history & politics? To make fools of his readers? To
>> tickle them out of their foolish notions?
>>
>> A Jewish Slave in Washington's home is hardly a method of subversion.
>> Or is it? More hysterical as I see it.
>>
>> Maybe I don't know enough about America to get all the subversion, but
>> then, is Pynchon writing for only those who specialize in American
>> Colonial History?
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>
> -
> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?listpynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l