MDMD[6]: Fatherhood & The Absent Author

[Harrison Sherwood]

>>From:  Paul Mackin

>Greg M writes:
>
>Paul Mackin's question:
>
>> But,  can we
>>say that Pynch is absent in other significant ways? Does he, for
>>example,  absent himself from his own writing? .... Has anyone ever
>>detected  an absence of authorial presense in the Pynchonian text?
>
>Greg responds:
>his main attraction was his OVERWHELMING
>authorial presence;  it's very strength is what causes people to love
>his
>books or find them totally unreadable.

"You will want cause and effect. All right." --GR

Let's not go conflating Voice and Presence. Pynchon is, without room for
cavil, a unique writer, and his authorial voice is so distinctive as to be
unmistakable within a few sentences. No arguments there. (Has anybody ever
read a really good _parody_ of Pynchon's style? I can't imagine nobody's
written one, and the temptation must be enormous...)

No, what I mean by "absent" is that P. insists (to a degree unique in
letters, nicht wahr?) that his works *must stand alone*, without his
authorial presence, the interpretive intermediary, deciphering it for us
after publication. No post-production support from TRP: no interviews, no
commentary, no book tours, no NPR chit-chat. The books, for all intents,
have no visible author, no...progenitor.

Think of a novel as one of those regressive pictures, where you have a
self-portrait posed standing next to a self-portrait posed standing next to
a self-portrait, u.s.w. In the center of that series of inward regressions
we have the plot of the book. One iteration outside that, we have the
narrator, who is presenting us the plot. Outside that, we have the
authorial voice (_not_ the same thing as the author), impersonating the
narrator. And finally, completely outside the frame, in *most cases* we
have the artist. _This_ is where Pynch is absent.

I have always understood Pynchon's famed reclusiveness as an _artistic_
stance, a peculiarly (neurotically?) insistent comment on art
itself--namely, that the artist is unnecessary to the the art. Think about
critical theories prevalent when Pynch was a student, theories that asked
whether we need to know the author of a work before we can judge its
merits. (John Crowe Ransom? The New Criticism? It's been quite a while; I'm
a little vague....)

Now, I'm not by any stretch of any dumb literalist imagination going to try
to assert that Jackson Pynchon should be considered a work of art. Instead,
what I'm getting at is that a Thomas Pynchon baby, unlike a Thomas Pynchon
novel, requires some post-production help. Nurturing, if you'll forgive a
hackneyed word. A dependable intermediary between him and the world.
Someone to interpret for him. Someone to interpret him to the world, too.

I'm pondering how much of that experience has informed Pynchon's latest
writing. And as I have said, I perceive quite a lot of evidence that there
_has_ been some communication between Pynch the Dad and Pynch the Artist,
between the Spark and the Wick. Pynch the Dad may very well prove to be the
medium through which we finally get to meet Pynch the Artist.

Just speculatin' here.

Harrison