Gottfried & Blicero, Nietzsche & Pynchon

[Mark Wright AIA]

Howdy


--- 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.

--- then Paul Mackin <pmackin at clark.net> wrote:

> Think this was from Jules Siegel but I don't recall it referring to
> "many
> of the episodes"--possibly however. I would think that in any good
> writer
> the meaning--the meaning for him or her--would be in substantial part
>  
> directed from the unconscious level--just as much of the meaning for
> the
> readers is unconscious (not all of course). But the point I wanted to
> make
> was that the book has such a complex, worked-out structure to it (as
> documented by Weisenburger for one) that a substantial part of the
> composition must surely has been carried out in the full light of day
> with
> all the author's conscious wits about him. Once this phase was
> complete P
> could light up his pipe and let the surface flow. (or so I would
> imagine)

It has always seemed to me that Pynchon's silence about himself and his
work is rooted in a powerful desire that his work not be constrained by
biography or by isolated off-the-cuff remarks about what this or that
"really" means. Once a critic (or any common or garden variety reader)
gets hold of such info the work, amibiguity and complexity collapse in
the mind and the experience of the work loses richness.

No great work of art is served by criticism which reduces a work to its
genesis.

Mark

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