Gottfried & Blicero, Nietzsche & Pynchon

[Dave Monroe]

I think that comment was in re: The Crying of Lot 49, and, while I don't
particularly doubt it, I think I came across it reported secondhand in that
J_l_s S__g_l book (L_n_l_nd), which I imagine many here will warn you to take
with a shaker of salt.  But I do think it tends to weaken a reading to depend on
positing something (inetntion) which (a) one can't ascertain, at least without
the cooperation of (b) someone (the author) who necessarily has their own
interests in presenting (or not presenting) their version of the story which (c)
may or may not be accurate in the first place and (d)
can't necessarily be considered the final word on the subject anyway (for at
least all of the preceding reasons), so ...

But, I agree, one cannot necessarily be said to have chosen with perfect,
absolute freedom each and ev'ry word one writes, utters, whatever, language (and
maybe chemistry as well ...) speaks you at least as much as you speak it, and
I'm also very wary of that Information/noise binary, separating the Significant
from teh insignificant, esp. in texts which not only foreground, but so often
address, that very problem.  Still, so much of GR, so much of any of TRP's
texts, seem so unusual, so unexpected, so potentially significant at LEAST in
that information theory sense, that it's hard to discount anything ... on the
other hand, yeah, a lot of it is SO f_ck_d _p, well, you can't HELP but wonder,
if not, "what was going on his head," then, "what was going on in his
bloodstream"?  That litany of dwarves or gnomes or whatever, that's the one that
always gets me ...

Stacy Borah wrote:

> Saying that there is "Not much of anything careless about Pynchon the
> writer" is overlooking one very important fact that Pynchon himself has
> admitted to:  the fact that he himself can't remember what he meant when he
> wrote many of the episodes in "GR", that he was either too wasted or too far
> out on some existential ledge to pull any coherent meaning out of his own
> text.  Can't remember right offhand where he said this, but i will look
> diligently tomorrow when I wake up.