real people

[Andrew Dinn]

TERRY CAESAR writes:

> Help! Anybody recall the name of that novel of a few years ago in which
> Normal Mailer is murdered? Mailer sued, I believe. The Mailer who actually
> lives, I mean, outside this novel or any other.

*Normal* Mailer! I hope that's a typo...

...


> What to make, I wondered, of so many recent works of fiction where
> real people appear. Not as characters. (C.f. Ford or Houdini in
> Doctorow's Ragtime.)  Merely as themselves, or registers of
> themselves, of their actual existence -- as in Ann Beattie's story,
> "A Vintage Thunderbird," where a couple meet a cabbie who brags that
> the other day he's just had Al Pacino.

> Is the locus classus of this sort of thing--whatever sort of
> thing it is-- the moment in GR where Slothrop sees Mickey Rooney?

No. The locus classicus has to be Gaddis' own appearance as Willie in
`The Recognitions' - not as a character but as himself, a register of
himself, whatever. The only difference is that what Willie stands for
is a damn sight more important than what Jack Nicholson or Al Pacino
stand for.

Contrariwise the nadir of this sort of thing -- whatever it is -- has
to be Martin Amis barging into Money and London Fields for no better
reason than to impose on the reader neither character nor register of
himself but rather register of the character he takes on in his own
onanistic fantasies.


Andrew Dinn
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Daran, nachdem die Wasserwogen / Von unsrer Suendflut sich verzogen
Der allerschoenste Regenbogen / Als Gottes Gnadenzeichen steht!