BtZ42 ye olde unbelievable story

[Mark Kohut]

Ish writes:
"For example, in one story the narrator tells a bunch of stories, sometimes
with photographs to aid her, to audiences who are amazed with her story
telling skills, and especially her fancy, that is, with her ability to
make, from her imagination, fantastic stories. But the stories are true.
They are, essentially, parts of an autobiography. When she tells her
stories to her lover, when she, essentially  confesses to her lover, her
lover never believes her. It is in this problem that reliability is
established. We believe her because others don't. A clever turn. Reminded
me of Shakespeare's sonnet about lovers that lie. "

This nice, nice summary of a narrated story wonderfully connects and jogs
me to ask a GR question lying half-fallow in me furrowed brow--before we
move on down the GR road.

Pirate dreams others' fantasies. From Johnson (samuel)--who distinguished
imagination from fancy (think fantasy as a genre), and esp Coleridge,
mebbe, if I remember anything right,  who sorta just talked about
"imagination" as the artist's way into the deepest understanding and then
remembering when Stormin' Norman Mailer once said something like "Any real
artist---or (maybe he just said) I"--can imagine the lives of 95% of
Americans; and when Brian Moore in *The Great Victorian Collection or *Steven
Milhauser---among others and others I don't know of--wrote their fables,
sorta parables with the underlying theme that the Artist is the one who
does imagineothers' daydreams and fantasies (in a Freudian sense) then:

is Pirate meant in some sense to be an artist figure?


On Mon, Apr 11, 2016 at 11:02 AM, ish mailian <ishmailian at gmail.com> wrote:

> There are endless possibilities for reliability and for un-reliability and
> for combinations of the endless variations of these two
> possibilities. Distance too offers endless possibilities.
>
> I've been reading short stories. Not the kind I've ever read about on this
> list. The kind, I think, folks here might find dreadful. These stories are
> said to fit into the renaissance in American short story making. They are
> realistic for the most part. And they are written by and heavily influenced
> by academics. What's striking about them is how they use narrators.
>
> For example, in one story the narrator tells a bunch of stories, sometimes
> with photographs to aid her, to audiences who are amazed with her story
> telling skills, and especially her fancy, that is, with her ability to
> make, from her imagination, fantastic stories. But the stories are true.
> They are, essentially, parts of an autobiography. When she tells her
> stories to her lover, when she, essentially  confesses to her lover, her
> lover never believes her. It is in this problem that reliability is
> established. We believe her because others don't. A clever turn. Reminded
> me of Shakespeare's sonnet about lovers that lie.
>
> When my love swears that she is made of truth,
> I do believe her, though I know she lies,
> That she might think me some untutored youth,
> Unlearnèd in the world’s false subtleties.
> Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
> Although she knows my days are past the best,
> Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
> On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
> But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
> And wherefore say not I that I am old?
> Oh, love’s best habit is in seeming trust,
> And age in love loves not to have years told.
>     Therefore I lie with her and she with me,
>     And in our by lies we flattered be.
>
>
> There are, as Booth, in The Rhetoric of Fiction, where the terms reliable
> and unreliable are coined,  endless possibilities.
>
> GR opens in a dream. The dreamer manages other people fantasies. Fantasies
> are manufactured with films and reels spin into reals.
>
> In film, sometimes, there is silence. Sometimes in silent films there is
> screaming we can see but not hear and sometimes the music of the film makes
> a scream and a paprodic commentary on the plot.
>
> One thing is for sure, Pynchon's narrative choices are important, if only
> because they permit greater opportunities for irony and parody.
>
> In GR, the history of film making is very important.
>
> Is the narrator of Pirate's dream, Pirate's dreaming mind,  or someone
> else's, or is it a movie voice over? Or have the reels meshed with the
> reals and dreams and fantasies of actors in a world that, as Shakespeare
> might have said, is all staged....all theater/theatre?
>
>
>
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