SLSL Intro, incl., "As Nearly as I Can Remember"
MalignD at aol.com
MalignD at aol.com
Sat Nov 2 11:06:43 CST 2002
Intro:
<<"At the simplest level, it had to do with language. We were encouraged
from many directions--Kerouac and the Beat writers, the diction of Saul
Bellow in The Adventures of Augie March, emerging voices like those of
Herbert Gold and Philip Roth--to see how at least two very distinct kinds of
English could be allowed in fiction to coexist.">>
Interesting in this is who Pynchon chooses not to mention: Nabokov, nearby
and looming at Cornell; Joyce; Gaddis. Rather, a number of the emerging
Jewish writers, Roth, Bellow, Gold (also Heller, Malamud (Mailer mentioned
elsewhere)), of whom Pynchon would be expected to be aware, of course, but
less stylistically of a piece than those unmentioned with either the writer
Pynchon was in his stories, or was to become. I have no particular comment
on this, beyond noticing.
Intro:
<< "It is only fair to warn even the most kindly disposed of readers that
there are some mighty tiresome passages here, juvenile and delinquent too.">>
Millison:
<<It may be possible to read that "As nearly as I can remember" as a caution
that what follows may not be completely reliable, that Pynchon may be
putting us on, to some degree, in this Intro. That was the suggestion once
made John Mascaro on the P-list. >>
This was a point raised in greater detail a year or so ago by the same source
-- arguing that Pynchon's tone in the Introduction was "ironic," a point of
view I find unlikely, and which, in any case, can only, I think, be argued to
a dead end either way. Still there are likelihoods to explore.
As I argued then, if Pynchon is being ironic, i.e., if his humility about the
quality of the work is intentionally unreliable, a feigned pose, to what end?
It is not a point of view readily shared with his readership, ala, Philip
Roth who, by making his ironic positions clear, invites the reader into a
consideration of the shifting boundaries of fact and fiction and forces the
reader repeatedly to reassess his assumptions about the degree to which Roth
is mining his own life in his fiction, by extension raising the same question
for all fiction.
This is not the case in Pynchon's Introduction. There is no clear
metafictional game-playing, no real reason for a reader to assume an ironic
point of view, unless one finds a discrepancy between the quality of the
stories and Pynchon's description of same, an idea worth exploring for a
moment.
If Pynchon believes his stories of high quality, and the irony of his Intro
plays within the space between the stories themselves and his description of
them, one must assume he believes the reader will conclude similarly (if not,
the irony is totally within Pynchon's head and the reader excluded, a rather
perverse joke), in which case the irony in the Introduction becomes evident.
But that places Pynchon in a not very attractive and somewhat grandiose
position vis-a-vis his stories and his readers; i.e., that his irony hinges
on the self-evident quality of that to which he refers, revealing his pose of
humility as, in fact, the opposite, a self-regarding vanity about the
stories' quality that he is asking his readers to share. The "plain folks"
style in which the Introduction is written makes this irony, if it exists,
only more unappetizing.
One doesn't want to get too far ahead of things and into the stories
themselves, but it's impossible to address the point I'm making without a
brief comment about the stories themselves, which is that they are not of
very high quality, particularly given the stature and quality of their
author's later work, something that will be borne out when the stories
themselves are discussed. Considered beside first collections of writers one
would readily mention with Pynchon--Flannery O'Conner, Hemingway, Joyce,
Faulkner--the Slow Learner stories seem wholly deserving of Pynchon's
modesty. Indeed, they are in many ways inferior to the first collections of
a number of talented minor writers.
I think, then, it is far more likely that Pynchon is evaluating candidly.
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