Otto v. Slothrop

[jporter]

Somewhere, back a ways, someone suggested that Otto (along with Gwyon, jr.)
represented Mr. Gaddis' point of view in THE RECOGNITIONS. My reflexive
response was, "Whaa.., No way. That palindromic moron (Otto) doesn't know
whether he's coming or going, etc..." And Otto is obviously a foil, of
sorts, for the "proper" artistic sensibility (young Gwyon after his
rebirth), which emerges later in the book. But I'm beginning to rethink
that. Not that Otto should be elevated, but about  his relationship to
Gaddis' aesthetics. The reader spends alot of time in and about Otto's
head, but Gaddis does not spare Otto. In keeping with the tenure of his own
time, Otto is not hep, but desparately wants to be... He is a product of
Gaddis' youthful artistic arrogance, which in the repressive early fifties
was bound to be projected a little defensively. Otto is held up as an
example of the: *This is what I'm not* type of character.

What is the relationship of Slothrop's consciousness to the aesthetics of
Pynchon? Compared with the Otto, Slothrop is much more sympathetically
drawn. Slothrop- being hep- does not deny his desires and fears (adding
much to our pleasure!), yet he is not totally Hip to the possibility that
his motivations have been engineered and provided by Them. So Slothrop is
faced, like Oedipa, with the choice of interpreting increasing knowledge as
either hipness or paranoia.  Interestingly, it is unclear whether or not
Slothrop comes to believe that They are as much controlled by Their need to
monitor and control Him as vice versa. Such a conclusion would be a
manifestation of GRANDIOSITY, one of the hallmarks of clinical paranoia.
Pynchon allows the tendrils of Slothrop's character to unwravel, the price
of his self-knowledge, but Slothrop is not reborn. Pynchon seems to feel no
need to either ridicule his foil, nor give us a character to demonstrate
*The proper artistic sensibilty* as Gaddis has with Gwyon, jr.

Leaping ahead here, both Otto and Slothrop can be (and I'm not sure why
anyone would want to do this) considered from the Artificial Intelligence
perspective. Both can be considered "sub-intelligences." They can be
considered from both ends of the AI perspective: what is consciousness (or
its illusion), and, how does one create or model intelligence,
"artificially."

It may seem trivial to recognize the similarity between literary
characterization and the growing discipline of AI, but when the theme of
the literary work is concerned with Self-Interest from the perspective of
Control: recognition, avoidance and accomodation- the link between AI and
art becomes deeper.

jp