M&D Deep Duck Read.

[alice malice]

I also get confused by the term "unreliable narrator" because I
understand this term, from its source, Booth's famous _The Rhetoric of
Fiction_, and, as I know you know, for Booth this term does not simply
mean a  narrator we can't trust, or take at face value. In any event,
the short answer is no When we read American Romance, as Hawthorne
defines it in his famous Preface to HSG, or as Chase defines it in his
wonderful study, we are constantly asked to question the obvious
account we are given by a narrator, who fills his descriptions with
subjunctive constructions, for example, a typical paragraph might
include

 perhaps this is not quite how things occurred, though there were
rumors that the devil had taken her to the wood, there were competing
ones that she had ascended to heaven. Most of the pious parishioners
believed the story told them from the pulpit on the Sunday following
the arrival of the new pastor who carried with him a letter from
Boston that he read in part only to the congregation, and, though many
suspected that what he had omitted confirmed what they had suspected
all along, that she was a devil, others claimed to have seen her doing
the works of charity befitting a nun, albeit a nun dressed as a
harlot, who carried a bag, the contents of which, some suspected,
included diabolical potions and, as one not so very convincing lad
professed, when interrogated by the constable, a dead baby. Perhaps
she was only a midwife, a practitioner of the arts her mother was said
to have learned from the wizard, Hogolth, though no one had ever seen
her, or him for that matter, and perhaps, if time allows, we will
learn....or maybe....

competing narratives, gossip, the very soul of fiction, is loaded up
with this mood, but, though Cherrycoke, to entertain, to keep himself
in out of the cold, stretches the truth, as Huck says of Twain, often
to include himself in the tale, foregrounding a narrative problem, how
one gets to show the reader what has happened if a narrator was not
there to see it etc., his reliability as Booth has it, is not
questioned because he represents the author's norms or values,
Pynchon's ideas about History and Fiction making and the value of tale
talling of fictionalized fabulated history etc.

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 5:27 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> I haven't yet read Tanner's essay on M &D, but when I get the book I will.
> like Alice, I love his insights---when I reread Shakespeare a few
> years avon now,
> I used Asimov's guidebook of annotations and Tanner's book of readings.
>
> But re the subjunctive: The subjunctive is a grammatical mood found in
> many languages. Subjunctive forms of verbs are typically used to
> express various states of unreality such as wish, emotion,
> possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or action that has not yet
> occurred - the precise situations in which they are used vary from
> language to language. The subjunctive is an irrealis mood (one that
> does not refer directly to what is necessarily real) - it is often
> contrasted with the indicative, which is a realis mood.
>
> 'Various states of unreality"......is this what an Unreliable Narrator
> tells us when it is supposedly the real story of Mason & Dixon?
>
> On Mon, Jan 5, 2015 at 12:05 PM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Good of Chase to caution the reader against rigid definitions; his own
>> definition of American Romance, like Tanner's of American Mystery, is
>> anything but. Also, with caution against rigidity, we might think
>> about M&D as an American Gothic narrative.
>>
>> On Sun, Jan 4, 2015 at 9:08 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Alice reminds us that Pynchon writes Romances in the 19th Century,
>>> Hawthorne, Melville sense.
>>> Richard Chase was the definer of the contours and strength of Romance.
>>> Two snippets related to Pynchon
>>>
>>> "Chase finds in it a new American romance genre peculiarly suited for
>>> exploring unresolved contradictions ..
>>> While Chase cautions the reader against any excessively rigid
>>> definitions of the American prose romance, he does state that since
>>> romance as a genre is less committed to verisimilitude than the novel,
>>> it tends to veer more toward myth, ...'
>>>
>>> M & D: Mythic America, full of contradictions, eh? (I went to school in Canada)
>>> -
>>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
>> -
>> Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l