pynchon-l-digest V1 #777: pygmies, 11 missing days, Barth, and , J.Stick

[JULIUS RAPER]

About the missing days: isn't this one of the reasons that postmod
novelists like to write historical novels?  There are so many missing days
in the past that it (the past) has almost as much power as the future for
freeing the imagination to reveal the invisible world (inside each).  It
is Maskelyne (p. 730) who speaks of "a Blank Sheet that invites Fiction"
along with, of course, "her vulgar friends, Slander and Vilification, to
sport upon it."  Mask. (any echo here of Durrell's spy in Mountolive?)
means by Blank Sheet his own moments "pass'd in solitude, unwitness'd by
others," but the gaps in history can invite the really inventive authors
(our man, also Barth, DeLillo, Durrell, and many more) to rush in with
possible-probable-inevitable solutions.  And who would know more about
unwitness'd moments inviting fictions, even villification, than our man?
	This subject takes me back to a message in digest #524 that I
missed from a certain man of wits dubbed Joaquin Stick defending the
content in Barth novel's esp. Chimera from someone's charge that Barth is
too self-referential or perhaps too self-indulgent.  Stick stuck with
Chimera, I take it, because its relevance (the hold of the past on the
parts men and women play) is relatively transparent.  But note that even
in the most difficult and self-referential places like Funhouse Barth is
exploring the importance of such topics as Blank Sheets when he has
Narcissus gaze in the blanks of the watery surfaces and find only himself. 
It is wise Tiresias, however, in that same sketch ("Echo") who wonders
whether the best way to "concern one's fatal self with another" may be to
"commence with the nearest and readiest"--whether the latter be one's own
self or one's own medium (eg, the novel).  Thus the self-referential
nature of postmod metafictions and fantasies (ie, projections of the
invisible innards).  Thus the interest contemp. psychoanalysis takes in
narcissism as something more important than Freud's lack of object love: 
all we know about the valued Others must begin as, or be filtered through,
that form of self-knowledge called introspection, for empathetic knowledge
is, in fact, vicarious introspection.  IOWs, if we devalue the
self-referential, we will likely err in evaluating the Other.  We may err
any way we approach the Other, but only more so if we don't begin with
self-understanding (echoes here of Thoreau and Emerson as well as H.
Kohut). And blanks, whether Sheets or waters or analysts, are the 2nd
royal road to the unconscious.  No wonder, in Tidewater Tales, the wife of
Peter Sagamore, the blocked increasingly minimalist fictionist, tells her
mate to take them sailing (once more to the blanks of the sea).  Would
that someone could do the same for Arafat and Natanyahou.  Maybe they
would be able to invent something new to get them past their deadly
cultural block.  And why stop with those two?  Take a few deans and
administrators and CEOs sailing too while they're at it.  Better we face
the blanks in our self than the chatter of opinion polls and media
opinion. 
					Dr. R/2