TRP and accuracy

[davemarc]

> From: Paul DiFilippo <ac038 at osfn.rhilinet.gov>
> 
> If, as SF critic John Clute among others, has suggested,
> the tactic of "misprision"--a deliberate kind of intuitive
> misapprehension or stretching of an author's works--can be a 
> valuable critical tool, then why can't _authorial misprision_
> work too:  an author's deliberate misapprehension of reality,
> transmuting it to something that is _truer than true_?  And hey,
> don't forget, TRP himself told us in the SLOW LEARNER intro
> that "ignorance is a territory with its own map."
> 
A quote that reminds me of Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote, where he
makes the case that the book's much lauded Spanish landscape is purely a
figment of Cervantes's imagination.  Indeed, imagination, like ignorance,
is a territory with its own map.  Cervantes's departures from reality don't
diminish the work, as far as I'm concerned.  They enrich it.

Jack Kerouac, D.H. Lawrence and Henry Miller consistently took events and
personalties they knew and re-presented them, distorted them, in their
writings.  They made enemies and wrote outstanding fiction in the process.

Most of Picasso's works weren't what most of us would understand as
"realistic" (though there are great anecdotes about how true-to-life some
his "distortions" really are).   Many might find many of his portraits
insulting, but most of us wouldn't know about that unless we knew more
about Picasso and his crowd.

Jules writes that Pynchon's alleged representations of Chrissie are
hurtful, insulting.  An odd thing about this is his willingness to point
this out repeatedly on and off the Internet, thereby exposing insultee
along with the alleged insulter.  If Jules hadn't done this, virtually no
one would be aware of the alleged insults.  Pynchon, who has rarely if ever
identified any of his acquaintances or claimed that any fictional
characters are realistic portraits of people he knows, has, if anything,
actually "protected" them (and, yes, himself) from the judgments of
strangers.  Now hundreds of strangers know about Chrissie's pecadilloes;
many more will.  As far as I know, Jules is the only writer in the history
of mankind who can take credit for that achievement.  

Jules writes about being offended by the use of one Yinglishism in what
might be the most distorted, freewheeling, and bizarre episode in the
entirety of M&D (which, as far as I can tell, he hasn't read).  (That's
okay with me.  I agree (with him) that he's perfectly entitled to feel
whatever he wants to feel about anything, whether or not anyone else thinks
his feelings have any correlation to reality.  I admit to being curious
about episodes in Pynchon's fiction that may relate to "reality," but my
own feeling is that they're ultimately fiction.  As far as Pynchon's
non-fiction's concerned, I'm curious as to whether anyone's ever found any
factual errors in those pieces.)

I happen to think that the Possibly Unlearned Yiddishism works well in the
imaginative literary landscape of M&D.  As our conversations indicate, it's
very evocative--just like the rest of the episode, which conflates George
Washington and Bill Clinton, draws parallels between the sometimes
competing claims of Jews and slaves (and their descendants) in the land
that became the United States, and is clearly not an attempt to be
realistic, inoffensive, and/or historically and linguistically accurate--at
least not on a superficial level.

One of the stated goals of Surrealism is to blur the line between
"contradictions" like reality and fantasy.  Pynchon's cartoony Mount Vernon
sequence--which intentionally or unintentionally blurs the line between
slave and Jew, standard Yiddish and Yinglish, and Washington and
Clinton--is a provocative realization of that goal that's as funny as it's
disturbing.  Perhaps it'd be useful and even healthy, when toying with
questions of accuracy and "reality" in Pynchon's fiction, to remember that
his imaginative terrain is that of Surrealism.

davemarc