M&D Deep Duck Read.

[Joseph Tracy]

It is harder for me to feel the ghosts than you Alice or even a narrowly Pynchon tone which is more obviously satiric in my mind. What this reminds me of Is Dylan Thomas's A Child's Christmas in Wales. The shift away from that begins when Cherrycoke does his confession of being a faker and mentions the war. Then anything becomes possible in a tragicomic abyss with the single word "meaningless".

On Jan 7, 2015, at 7:04 AM, alice malice wrote:

> 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

-
Pynchon-l / http://www.waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l