VLVL(6) "conditionally become Frenesi" 199.16

[Doug Millison]

I'd be the first to say that, generally speaking, what a person has to say
says more about that person that it does about anything else; obviously my
post says more about me than it says about Pynchon's theories of reading,
whatever they might be.  I did find this passage striking, and moving, and
I identified on many levels with Prairie, straining to get inside her
mother's skin via her films. Part of Pynchon's genius is to be able to
write about such universal longings and particularize them in a way that
lets an individual reader like myself respond emotionally and
intellectually. And I think you probably could make a pretty good case
that, to a certain degree -- the evening news should provide ample
demonstration -- we are all abandoned children looking for parents, hence
our need for jocular but stern old Henry Hyde of flinty eye and snowy hair,
the obsessively condemning Judge Starr, boomer Bill Clinton still seeking a
reprimand from his absent Daddy, Monica looking for...but I digress.

I don't know if I'd say the author is central to the act of literary
understanding, but it's true I don't like leaving the author out of the
picture entirely. I've read and enjoyed and delved deep into lots of books
without knowing more about the author than the dust jacket bio. I can read
and appreciate literary criticism that disregards the author (relatively
new in the history of literary criticism, I believe), just as I can read
and appreciate criticism that includes the author. But I like knowing what
I can know about the biographies of the artists who touch me. I like
knowing what I can know about Proust and his life (knowing that the War
gave him time to rewrite, revise, re-conceive  what had been a single
volume into the massive work we have now, for example), just as I like
knowing how Picasso and Bracque worked together to create Cubism, etc.
Confronted with Pynchon's awesome works, I'm curious about his life and
what goes into the making of his art, and I believe that many literary
critics share that curiosity. I've seen at least one recent example of a
specific biographical detail used to illuminate Pynchon's writings in a way
that would seem to merit a place within the realm of literary criticism --
Charles Hollander's article, "Abrams Remembers Pynchon", for example, in
_Pynchon Notes_ 36-39, which sheds light on VL and other Pynchon works. Is
there really no room in contemporary literary criticism for this kind of
human curiosity about the author?

I wouldn't try to argue that Pynchon presents us with an "authorial
directive that we all should read this way" and didn't say that in my post.
I do find it interesting that he plays with this notion of looking through
a work of art to find the artist, but maybe he's only using it for irony:
no matter how close she thinks she's getting to Frenesi through the films,
Prairie's nowhere near apprehending her mother in any sort of way that
amounts to more than the roughest approximation, many steps removed from
the real thing --  the Thanatoids have more substance than Frenesi on the
movieola.

Thanks for the thought-provoking response.

Doug