SLSL Intro, incl., "As Nearly as I Can Remember"

[MalignD at aol.com]

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.