M&D Deep Duck Read.

[alice malice]

Thanks Mark. I think we agree. Take what is a relatively simple
example, in what someone here (sorry I can't remember of find the
post) recently referred to as the frame narrative, page 6, the first
full paragraph, the second paragraph of the novel, a paragraph that
provides so much that we might ignore as we dig for more complexity of
meaning. The paragraph in many respects traditional exposition,
providing the traditional time and place setting, Christmastide of
1786, Philadelphia, what came before, or got us to this state, the
War. While we want to focus, especially on a second or third reading,
not on what is now settled, or even on the the Nation bickering into
fragments, but on what Pynchon has shrouded in fog, behind the
curtain, and the ghosts, we should not neglect the setting, and, and,
this is my point, the tone, set by the diction, the setting
description, the structure of the phrases, etc, and, and, my point is
that here we can identify the tone, or the attitude toward the subject
matter, in this case, what is to be revealed behind the curtain once
the fog lifts and Cherrycoke is given the narrative. That the frame
narrator is Pynchon is not my point. He is, as Booth says, the implied
author. His norms, his values, his attitude, the tone he takes here,
is that of Pynchon. So he notes that not all have been recorded, that
the place is haunted by ghosts, who have been sinned against, and the
story that follows, full of those ghosts and the sins, organized
murder of the Indians, enslavement, indenture of labor, that rise as
our buddy tale boys cut the Earth open. Cherrycoke as you say, is
another matter and on him we agree. I think.

On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 7:09 AM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:
> Nice, very nice ...but my short answer is: I don't think so.
>
> Cherrycoke's story is meant to be unreliable and the
> ground against which it is read is the (omniscient, if it is)
> narrator.
>
> That narrator creates the 'real' worldvison of the author.
>
> So, Pynchon is "telling us" that the stories about Mason & Dixon
> in America, even his, are hardly reliable.
>  Storytellers, historians(!)---which is Cherrycoke's role re M &D
> right? get it wrong finally. Or partial or contextless.
>
>
>
>
> On Tue, Jan 6, 2015 at 5:54 AM, alice malice <alicewmalice at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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
-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l