GRGR(4) - Slothrop's Rape

[Doug Millison]

At 4:17 PM -0400 6/18/99, Nudeants at aol.com wrote:
>Also keep in mind that Pynchon himself has said upon rereading portions of
>the novel later on that HE (Pynchon) was so fucked up during the writing of
>it that even he doesn't exactly know what he could have meant.  Surely we
>can't know which parts he's talking about, and therefore we can't discount
>anything from that arena, especially stuff on which we can't agree.

We can't know with any certainty that TRP ever said such a thing. Actually,
it's Jules Siegel who told the world that TRP said that, and it's difficult
to know which among the many things Siegel has said about TRP might be
true. He's a man with an axe to grind, and he's ground it very sharp for
his pronouncements about TRP over the years.  There is no independent
corroboration for this particular statement of Siegel's, and, depending on
your point of view, it might be taken to be quite derogatory for a writer
like TRP, who spends years working over his manuscripts before allowing
them to be published, hardly the act of a writer who doesn't know what he's
writing.  This is one of the dangers of reports from a biased source -- if
you don't think Siegel is biased when it comes to TRP, I refer you to his
book Lineland and his posts in the Pynchon-L archive -- about a person who
won't speak publicly to correct the record:  uncorroborated and possibly
false reports wyrm their way into the public record, where people, Matt in
this case, can pass them along as "fact".

d o u g  m i l l i s o n  http://www.online-journalist.com