Absence: A Clarification

[Sherwood, Harrison]

From: 	Sherwood, Harrison

[Screed containing no line breaks, paragraphs, or any sign that I ever
attended an
institute of higher or lower learning, or indeed can tie my own
shoesies]

Oh, spiffing! Strike another blow for clarity, Sherwood.

That does it. I will _never_ use my Gameboy to write email again.

Anybody mind if I take a mulligan on that one?

>>
>>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 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
hisauthorial
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 reiterative 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 peripheral, unecessary, even 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....)

Just speculatin' here.

Harrison