VLVL(6) "conditionally become Frenesi"

[MASCARO at humnet.ucla.edu]

Behind again, I come upon an occasion to debate with my dear
friend Dog-dougie on one of our favorite bones of contention--
the notion of who's behind the curtain. If I wasn't as suspicious of
"pychological" approaches to literature as I am to
"biographical" approaches, I'd venture the
idea that the scene Doug evokes reveals more about him than it does about P.'s
theories of reading. Doug equates the scene where Prairie desperately tries
to identify with her mother through the cinematic screen with the
condition of reader before the text seeking the author of the text.
On what grounds can we draw the analogy?
The desperate need of an abandoned child to find her  betraying mother
really shouldn't provide a healthy model of the reading paradigm, should it?
That it does seems to indicate a problem with our conception of
things literary.  I too sometimes feel that feeling Doug evokes of
trying to figure out the guy who wrote this stuff, trying to imagine 
the experiences that went into the expression on the page.But I
don't confuse that all-too-human curiosity with "literary criticism."

I think it is a strong misreading to see the passage Doug cites
as some "hint" that the absent Father wants his abandoned children 
to read through to him in the same way:
 
> Pynchon seems to be offering it up as an almost common-sense
>notion, that the viewer (or reader) can in fact apprehend the author
>directly through the work. 

I would submit that in terms of the novel's movement, it
makes a lot more sense to see this as one way of establishing the
unworldiness of Frenesi's being, her shadowy existence--not
thanatoid, but neither as real as, say, Zoyd or Prairie--
that almost transforms her life into film, and also to have
a powerful emotional reaction to the pathos of a lost child
searching through simulacra, seeking any access to her mother.
Gosh, Doug,
if we followed out your contention, that the P. here gives us a template
of reading,what would we conclude about
the person behind the typewriter? Or the act of reading itself, for that matter?
Is it really just the leftover debris of some primal dysfunction,
as heartbreaking as Prairie's desperate situation?
Some might want to say indeed the act of reading is analogous
to the search for the missing/abandoning Father, but I don't hold to that,
as noted above.  Too Freudian for my tastes.

It's a matter of degree on some level.  I don't
deny authors exist, or even that we can learn interesting things about
their work by knowing some of the facts of their lives, but to me
these are ancillary questions, and absent such knowledge, I hold, we are
in no way handicapped from full immersion/comprehension/
identification with any work of art. 
 But Doug seems to imply this connection with the physical reality
of the author is central to the act of literary understanding, 
not casually optional as I see it. So we diverge there.
Dougie further sees encoded in this passage an authorial directive that we all
 should read this way, and I strongly reject that gloss on the passage.

good provocative post, Dog-dougie.

johnny deboned
***********************************************
<snip>

>199.16 "At some point, Prairie understood that the person behind the camera
>most of the time really was her mother, and that if she kept her mind empty
>she could absorb, conditionally become, Frenesi, share her eyes, feel, when
>the frame shook with fatigue or fear or nausea, Frenesi's whole body there,
>as much as her mind choosing the frame, her will to go out there, load the
>roll, get the shot."

<snip>