Otto v. Slothrop

[Andrew Dinn]

JPorter writes:

[regarding Otto as revealing something about Gaddis, ditto for
Slothrop and Pynchon]

The original suggestion that Otto was Gaddis pretty stupid. This one
is not much better. I would have thought it didn't need saying but
evidently it does. *Otto reveals nothing about Gaddis*. He may indeed
serve a purpose in the novel as some sort of foil for what art should
be but as ever it is naive to presume that this has anything to do
with our Willie.

Personalising (or worse, psychologizing) the expression of Gaddis'
thoughts, insights, ideas is worse than mere speculation it is also an
admission of failure to engage with the novel per se - the most
insulting form of criticism and just the sort of side show which has
become the staple fare not just of bad literary academics but also
education in general, newspapers, TV, religion and chattering,
tittering masses everywhere. Read more of Gaddis books (double
entendre intended) if you want confirmation of this. Ditto for Pynchon
in spades.

DKipen writes:

> JP, re AI, I've always thought it might be fun to take a work written in
> multiple voices and run them all through one of those
> Gunning-Fogg-Flesch-Whosits style-analysis programs. You know, the kind that
> purport to isolate a writer's syntactic fingerprint via some kind of
> preposition-frequency matrix. Would the author really be disappearing inside
> all his narrators, or would some consistent figure in the carpet still
> remain? Does anybody know more than me, i.e. something, about these
> algorithms?

The guy who invented this technique was Sid Michaelson at Edinburgh,
whose made a study of the works of Jane Austen in the 1970s.
Prepositions are merely one index which has been suggested. Clause and
phrase structure was another runner, as were vocabulary frequency
tables and location of adjectives. I have a friend whose wife is
studying for a PhD at Edinburgh (while lecturing at Bristol) and her
research has shown that in almost every respect the presumptions on
which such analysis (Michaelson's and later) is based are flawed. They
have not demonstrated that there is such a thing as a "syntactic
fingerprint".


Andrew Dinn
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