Mass responses to the digest; I'm on deadlines & don't have
time for close argument.
David aka viscacha:
If you're going to make Monty Python references around here,
oughtn't they at least to involve Dennis Moore?
"This is the Lupine Express, is it not...?"
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Spectacled Bear:
Thanks for the list of CASTLEVIEW questions. I'll have to reread it soon and look at them again. (Meanwhile my STRANGE TRAVELLERS finally arrived in the mail -- I didn't advance order, because I usually prefer to buy from "The Other Change of Hobbit," but somehow every time I went there they were sold out, so I finally gave in and had them ship me one.
What a neat cover! Think I'll save it for holiday reading...)
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David Duffy:
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I think Peace is definitely modern in that sense. The logic, such as in the example above, is dream logic, and the modernists were all influenced by psychoanalysis.
Good point -- but then, "dream logic" leads straight to Lewis
Carroll and FINNEGANS WAKE...
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"Who knows what dreams may come" is relevant to the common model of confused ghosts working through all that difficult material before they "wake up".
"In death, what dreams may come:" Hamlet's soliloquy on the
possibilty of kakking himself. My PEACE is not handy; does he
quote it in there somewhere...
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William Ansley:
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I can't let this pass without comment. I am sure I won't change your mind Dan'l,
... it's a poor sort of a mind that can't be changed ...
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but as far as I am concerned, the only reasonable choice from your list of who Weer could be addressing when he says "ladies" in the passage you quote above is number 3 [ladies at the party].
I thought all three possibilities were reasonable but not equally coherent.
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I really have no idea what you mean when you say choice number 1 is the most 'coherent.'
I meant that it seemed to involve the smallest amount of assumption and contradiction. In fact, you have convinced me that #3 does.
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We have a book written by a dead man who doesn't know he is dead,
"Doesn't know" is ex hypothesi but may be too strong: "doesn't seem to know." In fact, I'd be equally willing to posit "knows but refuses to admit even to himself."
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and who seems to believe that he can send his mind back into the past to earlier parts of his life and yet doesn't seem to think that this is at all unusual.
Does Weer ever seem to think that anything is unusual... (Serious question; with the text not before me, I don't recall.) I mean Weer- the-narrator, not Weer-the-memory. This is one of the reasons I vaguely suspect that PEACE is a stage in a longer cycle of remembering and reconstructing/repenting: he seems almost affectless about the things he remembers/reexperiences/whatever.
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There are two or three short passages I have left out where
Weer's attention returns to the "present," as if he is just
reminiscing about his past. But the idea that we are just
reading reminiscences seems to be contradicted when the Weer
in the past talks as if he is a visitor from the future.
I think this is remarkably important, & have commented on it before. Not only is Weer not just remniscing, he knows that he is not just remniscing. Possibilities:
1. He imagines going back in time and talking to these people.
I find this a dull option.
2. He hallucinates same. Duller still.
3. He actually does do this. Certainly interesting, a time-
travelling (or -unstuck) ghost; but can it be supported?
If he does travel back in time and take control of his
earlier self the way he seems to several times, I think he'd
have been committed.
4. Variant on above (and on "Chinese pillow" interpretation of
PEACE): throughout his life he has had "flashforwards" to the
time when he needs to consult a doctor though dead; rather than
later-Weer "possessing" younger-Weer, younger-Weer "channels"
for later-Weer.
5. He is presented with the appearance of going-back and interacting
with his past. This is the "Purgatory" option in full bloom, and
my first choice.
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But, leaving all this aside, I think there is textual evidence that Weer is addressing the ladies at his fifth birthday party. On p. 5 we see this: "There is a white Pekinese as big as a spaniel at her feet, and it snarls when anyone comes too near. (Laugh, ladies, but Ming-Sno will bite.)"
That is sufficient for me, and I am embarassed not to have caught it myself; I've certainly noticed the passage before.
I guess I got carried away -- I'm semi-desperate to work out why and for whom Weer (believes he) is writing. I think this is as important as the "Time of Narration," which I hold as settled beyond reasonable argument: He's narrating From Beyond The Grave.
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Adam Stephanides:
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I would analyze it a bit differently. I think that when Weer's mind is in the "past" he remains aware of his "present" situation;
Actually his "past" seems to somewhat influence the structure of his "present," so that his childhood memories are remembered on the porch and his presidency in the office. Where in the "memory house" he is seems to flow with when in his life he is mostly remembering. Or maybe the other way around -- when he's in the office, it's easiest for him to remember his presidency?
Well, that's another point to investigate further -- purely from a memorious overview of the book, though, it seems to work; porch and outdoors for childhood, various hallways and rooms for main adult life, office for presidency/older age. Something like that, with variations and elaborations.
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Adam Stephanides also wrote:
By "deconstructing the act of narration," I don't mean just that Wolfe specifies the circumstances of narration, which as you point out is commonplace. I mean that he also uses this specification to call into questions the conventions for reading narrative which I referred to in my original post.
Even that is not quite how I understand "deconstruction" -- I would understand it to mean using those conventions precisely in a way that they call their own constituion into question, i.e., letting the construction to de-construct itself: but my understanding of "deconstruction" is largely based on the Derridean non-synthesis, so I tend to look for hinges and difference-deference and the like.
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Aside from PEACE, examples I'm thinking of are the point
in TBotNS where Severian says to his readers words to the effect of "no doubt you're wondering how I'm able to repeat all these conversations verbatim," when of coulse we haven't been wondering because one of the conventions is that narrators can do this; and the revelation at the end of TBotLS. While I haven't read a lot of Lovecraft, I doubt that he does this; I doubt, for instance, that he expects his readers to ask how his narrator can produce a full and accurate account when in imminent danger from unspeakable monsters.
No; he seems to take it for granted (and expect us to) that his narrators stick to their desks, writing to the end, even when the writing turns into gibbering. Really, now, has anyone in the history of the Universe gibbered hysterically in writing? Pfui! Even as a twelve-year-old, when I first encountered HPL, it bothered me; I couldn't believe then and can't believe now that he actually intended us to believe this. Yet every bit of evidence says that he did.
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And, to anticipate a point you may be about to make, I'm aware that there are a few mystery novels in which what appears to be a reliable narrator is ultimately revealed as unreliable.
Wouldn't think of evincing these; that's a mystery convention in itself and not relevant outside the over/under-defined bounds of the crime "genre." It's basic to the mystery genre that when the story is over all is revealed at least semi-openly, at least to the reader; that is clearly not Wolfe's technic.
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You seem to be pointing at a kind of "experimental" that was very experimental indeed in the 1920s, and that most of the pomos would sniff at as mere "modernism."
While in some circles the modernists may be considered passe, their aims (as opposed to isolated techniques) are still not accepted by the broad reading public, and even the average "literary" novel published today, I would suspect, is closer in aims and technique to Balzac or George Eliot than to THE SOUND AND THE FURY or ULYSSES.
I think I disagree but I would not care to mount an argument for either side without more research than I am prepared to go into for this side discussion.
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In any case, a "very conservative" writer (your words) would reject the modernists, rather than imitating them.
I do not suggest that Wolfe imitates the modernists; I suggest that he grabs their tools where he finds them useful, and ditto the pomos, and uses them for his own, fundamentally conservative, purposes.
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And I think that in some ways PEACE goes beyond the modernist works of the 1920s.
Well, since FW has a date in the '30s, and I believe Beckett got going then too, I won't disagree...
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And it is indeed putting the story
first: but the story being put first is not necessarily the story that the reader immediately thinks it is. The process by which some events are related is every bit as legitimate a "subject" for a story as the process by which they occurred.
If this counts as "putting the story first," then the contrast between "putting the story first" and postmodernism disappears.
... and your point is? I tend to think the actual radicalism of
pomo is highly overstated and overrated; they have some cool tools but no really new ideas. "Truth is socially constructed." Now there is an original idea... Someone please contact Pontius Pilate...
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Indeed, one of postmodernism's characteristic features is to
emphasize "the process by which some events are related" over
"the process by which they occurred."
See previous message re: the Nights... Nothing new here...
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And for this very reason, that prototypical postmodernist John Barth has also adopted the Thousand Nights and a Night as a model.
Someone wrote to me offline, who seemed to think that Barth does not qualify as pomo. I shall let that individual step forward and defend this strange idea him or herself if s/he chooses; I mention it only to emphasise, I don't think there's a clear meaning for either word ("modernist"/"pomo") -- it might even be fun to, ah, deconstruct the permeable bar between the two words... But not for me...
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... or as AD Groce writes,
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This seems to bring us back to the whole question of how to
know postmodernism (and without the aid of a SF oracle like
Damon Knight's finger).
Now that is a strange image... (Yes, yes, I know what you're referring to, but Damon's finger as an oracle... Shudder...)
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But notice that Wolfe, while he write about stories being told, telling themselves, etc., never (AFAIK) does the kind of metafictional introduction of himself that Barth does
Alec, may I refer you to "The Last Thrilling Wonder Story" or
"The Sister's Tale"?
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Wolfe's stories and novels are often, like Nabokov's, "the
documents in the case," with internal discussion of how they
came to be written.
... which is why, btw, I so desperately want to figure out the
who and why of PEACE's narration. It seems unlikely, given Wolfe's other first person work, that this isn't important.
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Use of the 1001 Nights does not a postmodernist make--Proust
and R. A. Lafferty are both frequent travelers to that territory, and Proust is a modernist and Lafferty is whatever on earth Lafferty is.
How about "Science Fiction's other weird literary Catholic"?
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Happy Friday, everyone!
--Dan'l/Blattid