Meshugginah posts, and other things sundry

[Tom Stanton]

At 10:19 AM 7/6/97 -0800, Doug Millison wrote:
>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 

I never said he left himself out of the books. What he did do, and very
deliberately, was take his personal life out of the public view so that, to
paraphrase Norbert Weiner (sp?) "the text is all their is." Why he did it,
how much of him is in the books, etc. is all speculation. No one knows,
& I believe that was the whole point. You can't correlate what he was
doing at home with what he wrote. You only have the book.

>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. 

Agreed. Jules contends that he was remote, distant, and an outsider
looking into a scene & using it to his own ends. How much of this is
true is uncertain because we only have Jules & Chrissie & their brief
time together. No one, Jules included, knows what was going on in the
70s or where he was hanging out (Aptos, yes, but so what?) or who he
spent his time with -- we only have "Vineland" and Jules' observations
from an earlier period.