Meshugginah posts, and other things sundry

[Doug Millison]

I agree with Vaska that we don't know enough about Pynchon personally to
judge how much of himself and his life winds up in recognizable form on the
page, but I don't think novelists can leave their lives out of their books;
it's a question of how deep it's buried--simple roman a clef, or bits and
pieces of the writer's experiences and interests and reading spread out
across and within characters and episodes--not whether it's there or not. A
novelist doesn't work in a realm of pure mental confection without
connection to the life he or she lives:  experiences, conversations, books,
ideas, and emotions all form the grist for the novelist's mill. That's
where journalism and fiction part ways -- the journalist begins with this
same grist, but generally has to keep it in a recognizable state, even in
the most extreme gonzo journalism approach; the novelist can twist and
reshape and layer invention on, but never escape those roots entirely.

-Doug

At 12:05 PM 7/6/97, Vaska wrote:
>we do not *know* that Pynchon has left himself or
>his personal life our of his fiction.  We simply have far too little
>evidence to make any such conclusions at all -- and pace everything Joyce
>has said on this topic, I do find it hard to imagine a writer capable of
>achieving such a feat of extra-terrestrialism.  Put this last remark down to
>some quirk of my own, some failure of the imagination, if you like.  The
>fact remains that we have absolutely no reason to believe that "[t]here are
>no relationships between TRP's "life" and what he wrote."  Pynchon's
>reticence on this, and his fierce resolve to keep as much as he can about
>his private life away from the public eye, may just as well point to the
>opposite.  I don't think I'm saying anything controversial here.


D O U G  M I L L I S O N ||||||||||||| millison at online-journalist.com