Self-Indulgence

[Andrew Dinn]

Jeffrey K. Carney writes:

> Curiously, those writers who really stand out in history as unique voices
> are those who took monumental chances.  In a sense, great writing is always
> a form of self-indulgence.  At what point does it become unbearable?  At
> what point do we lose the delicious sense of being taken for a ride and
> acquire the alarming sense that our pilot has utterly fogotten us--that
> indeed his unconcern suggests a certain contempt for us?

Sorry to butt in on a debate I missed the start of (our network was
down for a few days) but I really dislike this picture of the author
as a pilot leading his/her readers. I mean even if someone produces a
map and hands you a compass that doesn't mean you automatically start
walking, does it.

Contrariwise, an apparent jumble is yours to investigate, dissect,
reconstruct in your own likeness, whatever *you* can make of it. It
would be contemptuous if such an attempt were impossible, if the
jumble was real not apparent, but when, as in the case of Ulysses, it
is all too readily possible, everything fits neatly into place, or, as
in the case of Gravity's Rainbow, it is always tantalisingly on the
edge of possibility you can hardly accuse the author of mumbling into
his beard or farting in the reader's face. The very complexity of
these novels indicates a concern to engage the reader.

> Posing the question this way suggests that a text is a one-way thing.  Of
> course it is not.  An experience of literature is always a product of the
> writer and the reader working in some sort of concert.  What feels
> self-indulgent to me because I can no longer hang on may not be
> self-indulgent for others.  And of course self-indeulgence tends to come in
> waves.  Much of GR is quite lucid.  Some of it takes more work on my part
> than I want to invest.  But maybe that's part of the experience.  As I tell
> my students, confusion, like grief, is a valid human emotion.  There comes
> a point at which we may allow ourselves to say, "Yes, I'm confused, but I
> love every morsel of this confusion."

I thnk the question of authorial self-indulgence is as misguided as
the notion that your (or other individuals') ability to pursue study
of the book is a useful measure of its worth. The writer and reader
never do work together in some sort of concert (especially in
Pynchon's case where the man does not officially exist). You have the
book and that is it. Pynchon's motives and motivation are hardly
relevant if they don't appear in the book. Your worry that he is
indulging his own concerns would be better directed at arguing for the
irrelevance and/or incoherence of the text itself. 

I agree that one of the major themes of Gravity's Rainbow is to
delineate the bounds of the knowable and the understandable, to
highlight the necessity, validity and value of confusion and
misunderstanding. But this is not an endorsement of confusion per
se. Even where the text deliberately confuses issues it does so to
reveal. To reveal something about the nature of confusion.

> So I guess that "self-indulgent" need not be a term of criticism as much as
> it is a raw description.  One may admire a particular writer's
> self-indulgence or not, as one chooses.  But I think most of us would agree
> that where many writers are overtly and demonstrably interested in their
> reader's reactions, many, like Pynchon, are not always so, but are rather
> interested in pursuing, at whatever cost, the limits of their own vision.

No, Pynchon is not interested in his readers' reactions. He is
interested in their minds. Gravity's Rainbow is a thoroughly didactic
novel but not in the doctrinaire or manipulative sense you use to
characterise the alternative. It's didacticism comes from undermining
presumptions, disassembling situation and character, displaying the
contingency and incompleteness of schemes and plots. William Blake
wrote:

    I must invent a system or be enslaved by another man's.

Pynchon's response to this is not to start labouring over and
promoting his own system but to *show how* one system will never be
adequate, how we are always putting up scaffolding, knocking down one
erection to make way for another, continually changing coordinates,
bypassing inconsistencies, switching from system to system in order to
survive.


Andrew Dinn
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there is no map / and a compass / wouldn't help at all