Absence: A Clarification

[Sherwood, Harrison]

>>>>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.>Ah. I see where I have been unclear. My
apologies.Let's not go conflating Voice and Presence. Pynchon is,
without room forcavil, a unique writer, and his authorial voice is
so distinctive as to beunmistakable within a few sentences. No
arguments there. (Has anybody everread a really good _parody_ of
Pynchon's style? I can't imagine nobody'swritten one, and the
temptation must be enormous...)No, what I mean by "absent" is that
P. insists (to a degree unique inletters, nicht wahr?) that his
works *must stand alone*, without hisauthorial presence, the
interpretive intermediary, deciphering it for usafter publication.
No post-production support from TRP: no interviews, nocommentary, 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
reiterative pictures, where you have aself-portrait posed standing
next to a self-portrait posed standing nextto a self-portrait,
u.s.w. In the center of that series of inwardregressions we have the
plot of the book. One iteration outside that, wehave the narrator,
who is presenting us the plot. Outside that, we havethe authorial
voice (_not_ the same thing as the author), impersonatingthe
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
artitself--namely, that the artist is peripheral, unnecessary, even,
to the the art. 
Think about critical theories prevalent when Pynch was a student,
theories that askedwhether we need to know the author of a work before
we can judge itsmerits. (John Crowe Ransom? The New Criticism? It's been
quite a while;I'm a little vague....)Just speculatin' here.Harrison