Meshugginah posts, and other things sundry

[Doug Millison]

At 2:45 PM 7/6/97, Tom Stanton wrote:
>The guilty pleasure
>of Jules & Chrissie discussing his life has affected how I re-read GR
>during the on-line discussion & after "Lineland."

I've just finished reading Lineland, and the surprising thing for me is
just how little there is to "feel guilty" about.

Chrissie says very little in Lineland; Jules puts most of the words in her
mouth. Pynchon is not available to answer the assertions and sometimes ugly
allegations that Jules makes. As a journalist, Jules has stacked the deck
and, mixing barroom metaphors, sucker-punched his way through a ghostly
encounter with 30+-year-old memories of Pynchon.

Pynchon has known many other people besides Jules and Chrissie who have
apparently been directly involved (in person, on the phone, in epistolary
correspondence) with Pynchon for only a tiny fraction of Pynchon's life. It
seems absurd to me to re-evalutate GR or any other Pynchon novel in any
significant way based on what Jules and Chrissie say in Lineland for at
least two reasons:

(1) Jules may not be an altogether reliable observer. There's no real way
to confirm or deny much of what he says about Pynchon; his journalistic
stance is first person, self-referential rather than being based on
reporting from sources that can be checked for accuracy or otherwise
corroborated. Jules also tells us that a lot of it happened within a
marijuana haze that can subvert the best intentions of clear, error-free
recollection.

(2) I find it difficult to credit two people with the degree of influence
that Jules seems to want to claim over a body of work as broad and as deep
as Pynchon's. Even assuming that Jules and Chrissie are reflected somehow
in Pynchon's fiction, their influence must necessarily dwindle when you
range them alongside the rest of the people Pynchon has known, places he's
been, family experiences he has had, books and other things he's read, and
the other countless influences we have no way to imagine concretely.

-Doug





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