Do we have to like the P-Man?

[Paul Nightingale]

Is the P-Man a lefty? And if he is, what do we think of him? Do we like him?
Is he someone I'd like to have a few beers with? Am I someone he'd like to
have a few beers with?

This line of inquiry - satirised on the first page of the Slow Learner
intro - seeks to turn the P-Man into a celebrity; this is a game he has
always refused to play. Part of my approach to reading any text is to
consider it a social production; the writer in question isn't an author if,
by that, we mean the source of meaning. This means he can only write the
book than it's possible to write. An interviewer would ask the P-Man
questions.

- Why did M&D take 20 years to write?
- It did?
- That's what I heard.
- Right ...

A critic seeks to decode the text to expose the author who lurks within
(what Allon White, in his study of the modernist novel, called "symptomatic
reading").

- Is he gay?
- Well yes, I think he is. There's a lot of evidence.
- Is he a woman?
- I wouldn't rule it out.

Once we surrender this obsession with the author-as-celebrity we might have
more time to spend on the text-as-text. The Slow Learner intro is as close
to autobiography as seems to exist; yet the 'I' who "put on hornrimmed
sunglasses at night" is interchangeable with the 'we' who "were at a
transition point, a strange post-Beat passage of cultural time". Firstly the
'I' is aware of his status as a character; secondly, that character is a
function of the text. Perhaps, when he was thinking of publishing the
stories, and writing an autobiographical backdrop to the collection, he was
starting to think seriously of a character who would be a storyteller. The
older P-Man's comments on his younger self (and the younger self's work)
illuminate Cherrycoke's dilemma: writing is both recovery and a form of
assassination (because recovery is doomed to failure).

This, of course, is no more than idle speculation ...