irony WAS RE: is Pynchon a recluse?

[Terrance]

MalignD at aol.com wrote:
> 
> Lycidas:
> 
> <<Actually, I agree 100% >>
> 
> Are you talking to me?

Yes Boss. 


Yes Boss.  A generally straightforward and honest
reassessment , no doubt about it. 

Otto posted a critical essay...Yes boss, yes boss, here it 
is, 

Homoerotic Bonding as Escape from Heterosexual
Responsibility in Pynchon's Slow Learner.(Thomas Pynchon)
Author/s: Mark D. Hawthorne


Now I like Mr. Hawthorne's essays and I like this essay, but
one should have some basis for the claim that the Intro is
"an ironic document."

Other than this big problem and the stupid speculations
about P's life, the reclusive mystery man stuff and
conflation of P's life and fiction, the essay is OK. 

Hawthorne says,  

If this introduction is, as the self deprecating tone seems
to indicate, an ironic document, such as we might expect
from the writer of V. and The Crying of Lot 49, both of
which he treats disparagingly in it, then we need to
recognize that an introduction may be both an
"interpolation" that encourages us to read the stories from
a particular vantage and an "instruction" that narrows our
expectations. Thus we fall into the same sort of narrative
entrapments that we find in The Crying of Lot 49. When
Oedipa tries to determine the meaning of the muted horn,
WASTE, or the suspicious lines in The Courier's Tragedy, she
finds herself trapped in convoluted webs of misinformation.
As Chris Hall recognized, "All of Pynchon's fictions involve
problems of reading and interpretation, but  perhaps nowhere
is this more self-consciously so than in The Crying of Lot
49" (63).
While we want to rely on Pynchon's introduction, he has
confounded us by obscuring any reliable information with
misinformation.

AND

When we read the introduction ironically, we, like Pynchon
himself, place the stories in a preOedipa(l) position. From
this vantage we read the stories as Pynchon's apprenticeship
in giving voice to the speechless and visibility to the
invisible.


Yes boss, the government hand shake
yes boss, the crusher of language
yes boss,  the white facts and faces at the head of the
table
Yes Mr. Rhodesia gonna get me a scholarship and live in 
America 

cause I believe in the future  
I shall live in my car 
with my radio tuned to the voice of a star
dog days of summer barking at the break of dawn
heat lightning dances in the yellow cloud
and Her streets, quiet as these sleeping armies
send their scattered dreams to the wasteland 
to the wasteland 
to the wasteland
to the no man's land of the near future

Yes boss
yes boss
yes boss

Strike! 
Strike Ishmael! 
Strike!
Strike through the curtain of the night's stage

Emotional Terrance? 

A key word. It is reinforced by T. S. Eliot's notion, in
*Tradition and the Individual Talent*  (1919), that: "Poetry
is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from
emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an
escape from personality."  Thus an Imagist poem may be
poignantly posed, but it should not slide into agonized
self-reflections or sentiment. Language!  The linguistic
crisis of  Modernist poetry not only demanded intensity, it
challenged the prevalent philosophy of language. This
philosophy posited language as a transparent medium through
which an unproblematic and undistorted "reality"  is
represented. For the modernist poet language is emphasized
and foregrounded to such an extent that it becomes the most
important "point" of the poem. Poetry scrutinizes the form,
the contours, the material of the mask (STRIKE!)  of
language. 

Strike! 


Modernist poetry is agonizingly self-conscious, probing its
own limits and restrictions, foregrounding itself as text,
as the interface of many texts. The process of
poetry-writing becomes the object of poetry, so that the way
a text is constructed, how it connotes many possibilities of
meaning and many voices, becomes that which the poem is
about. 

We can, perhaps, see why Browning was read with interest by
many early twentieth-century poets. Modernism foregrounds
form over content, or rather, it opens up for questioning
the whole economy of language through which form and content
are established as distinct and separate textual dimensions.
Pound's  Cantos continually emphasizes its own materiality.
Alongside their other project of historical synthesis, The
Cantos expose language as dirty, desirous splashes of ink;
echoes of other languages intrude, typographical errors
aren't edited out. Sometimes words are 'chosen' not for
reasons of
sense or meaning but because of the pattern they  make on
the page.  

This, of course, has a profound bearing on how the role of
the poet and of the reader is understood. A form of writing
in which writing itself is so prioritized has also to
re-write our understanding of who is "responsible for"
poetry. Who?  YOU? Who is it that can ultimately  guarantee
its meaning? Despite the authoritarian postures adopted by
particular modernist writers, poetry may be read as
acknowledging that the position of both writer and reader is
relative, non-omniscient, constructed by the forces of
language. Furthermore, this sense of fragmentation has
permeated the possibilities of writing to such an extent
that the resultant feeling is that all possibilities of
unity have been lost. Modernist poetry, in the words of
Lewis Carroll's The Hunting of the Snark (1876), spurned
"merely conventional signs," navigating itself by a map
which was: A perfect and absolute blank!" 

Here Fausto. Here boy. 


What of the desires of its writers, whose quest is still
towards home dear Dorothy? 
The lost generation, not too unlike the Beats, those JD
boys, father gone off
to war, those  lost from home boys met a common crisis that
included the loss 
of a stable selfhood and meaning - a problematization of the
individual subject somewhat analogous to that enacted by
Freudian  psychoanalysis and Marxist political theory. And
what these breaks in poetic consciousness and linguistic
coherence were signaling was the chasm in personal and
national identity which World War I brought to crisis point.