SLSL intro as fiction/meta-fiction/memoir/advice to young writer

[pynchonoid]

MalignD notes that Pynchon chooses to include some
authors to mention as influences in this Intro, and
excludes others, who for various reasons and to
various observers, seem to be more likely choices --
Nabokov, Gaddis, etc. 

For starters, I doubt highly that Pynchon was
suffering under page count limitations -- I don't know
this for a fact, but I expect that his publisher would
have let him expand this Intro to whatever length he
wanted.  So I wouldn't argue that he's limiting the
writers he mentions for that reason.

Instead, Pynchon does what every writer -- unless
she's publishing in the near-infintely expandable 
environment of the Web, and even then some writers
wind up editing themselves to produce more powerful
works -- must do:  he picks and chooses what to
mention, what to leave out. He makes choices -- some
of them conscious, some of them unconscious, but
certainly in the rewriting and editing phase he makes
conscious choices about what to present and what to
omit.  Thus, Pynchon shapes the story he will present,
in the end, to his readers; in the process, he shapes
and inflects a persona of himself as a younger writer,
as well as a persona of himself as an older writer
looking at himself as a younger writer (Tim's apt
mirror image).

Is he writing "fiction", Michel asks?  That's a good
question, given that the tools and techniques used in
a memoir (I'm not sure that's exactly the right term
for this Intro, either -- given the didactic purpose
that davemarc reminded us to consider) are the same as
in fiction.  Professor Todd Willy, in the Department
of Rhetoric at UC Berkeley, used to teach a course
called "Rhetoric of the Novel" -- in which, one
semester, he included Mishima's _Sun and Steel_, a
book that Mishima presented as autobiography; in
class, Willy discussed it in the same terms that he 
discussed the novels he taught. 

As he looks back, Pynchon seems to choose to emphasize
works that meant more to him personally, which he now
(at the time of the Intro's composition) understands
to have been significant influences on his earliest
development as a short story writer as he moves beyond
the simpler things he wrote in high school and
earlier.  His work develops complexity, they grow
larger, over the next 15 years ( from the debut he
places in 1958) -- they grow to challenge, in their
scope and depth, the more complex novels that he may
have also encountered during the earlier phase. 
Pynchon seems to have realized this, by the
mid-sixties, in the letters to his literary agent in
which he speaks with some excitement about the
projects he's pursuing-- in those remarks, I sense
that Pynchon finally has a clear picture of just how
high he might be able to reach, how deep, how broad --
after the publication and reception of V., perhaps it
becomes clear to him that, after some years developing
his craft, he can now use it to write books that rival
the 20th century masterpieces.  He may have read Joyce
in high school, but only after a certain amount of
development as a writer does he appear to have begun
to see that he might create a fictional universe that
could be considered as attaining Joycean proportions ,
just to mention one author often compared to Pynchon
(or vice versa).  

In this Intro, as he depicts the young writer he now
sees himself to have been, it's not surprising that he
might name some books that showed him how, using the
language and concepts over which he had already
attained some degree of control, he might be able to
start.  He may not be able to start out writing as
Joyce or another of the recognized literary giants; 
but Kerouac, Gold, Mailer, Bellow -- it seems he sees
them in an arena where he, in the mid-to-late 50's,
with the chops he's got already, might play. 

He may have secretly thought, somewhere in his
20-year-old mind or heart, that he would one day be
able to surpass than these writers -- that's what
seems to slip out in those enthusiastic letters to his
agent in the '60s -- but, looking back from the
vantage point of the 47-year-old writer he is in 1984,
he tells us the names of the writers who helped him
actually get his start, by setting an example he was
then able to follow.

Just my 2 cents, of course. 

-Doug



<http://www.google.com/search?q=Pynchon+%2B+Donadio&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&filter=0>

<http://www.salon.com/media/1998/03/10media.html>
"The Pynchon-Esquire connection is just one of the
revelations contained in a series of letters, more
than 120 in all, that the famously reclusive author
wrote to his former agent, Candida Donadio, between
1963 and 1982. The content of those letters became
public last week, almost certainly against Pynchon's
will, when the New York Times published a wide
selection of excerpts from them. They depict a young
author veering -- as young authors are wont to do --
between braggadocio and deep uncertainty. "If they
come out on paper anything like they are inside my
head," Pynchon writes about four novels-in-progress in
a 1964 letter, "then it will be the literary event of
the millennium." At other moments, according to the
Times, Pynchon wondered whether he should give up
writing and seek another avenue of expression."

<http://home.earthlink.net/~uur/mask.htm>
March 4, 1998
New York Times

Pynchon's Letters Nudge His Mask

By MEL GUSSOW

[...]  The letters are brightened by the author's gift
for language and his mischievous sense of comedy, with
which he assails publishers, critics and politicians.
When he hears that the humorist H. Allen Smith has
written an article for Playboy claiming to be both
J.D. Salinger and Thomas Pynchon, he says, "What no
one knows is that Smith is actually Pierre Salinger,
and I am H. Allen Smith." 
[...] 
In the first letter, dated March 4, 1963, he makes
corrections for the British edition of "V," then
speaks about dodging two reporters from Time magazine.
Thinking about Time leads him to read "A Death in the
Family," the posthumously published autobiographical
novel by James Agee, who had been a Time movie critic.
He expresses his hatred of Henry Luce and his
admiration for Agee's book. 
[...]
In April 1964, Pynchon tells Ms. Donadio he is facing
a creative crisis, with four novels in process. With
sudden bravado, he says, "If they come out on paper
anything like they are inside my head, then it will be
the literary event of the millennium." If so, he wryly
suggests that Alfred Knopf and Bennett Cerf will have
a duel to see which one will be be his publisher. 
[...] he remembers his original desire to study
mathematics, a plan that ended when his application to
the University of California was rejected. It occurs
to him that perhaps writing is all he can do. He asks
himself if he is good at it and answers that he does
not know. 

The next year, he is in the middle of writing a book
that he characterizes as a potboiler. When it grows to
155 pages, he calls it "a short story, but with gland
trouble," and hopes that his agent "can unload it on
some poor sucker." The book turned out to be his
highly praised second novel, "The Crying of Lot 49."
[...]
Ms. Donadio regularly sends him books to read and, if
he is in the mood, to write a blurb for a dust jacket,
and he also receives books from publishers. He is
generous in his responses, applauding John Cheever,
John Hawkes, Bruce Jay Friedman and lesser-known
writers. 

On the other hand, when Ms. Donadio sends an unnamed
Pynchon novel (presumably "Lot 49") to Saul Bellow for
comment, Bellow answers with a terse postcard: "Read
it? Sure. Tout it? I doubt it." 

In a handwritten letter in January 1975, Pynchon
mentions for the first time another work in progress,
"Mason & Dixon," 22 years before it was published.
[..] 


<http://www.nytimes.com/library/books/032198pynchon-letters.html>
March 21, 1998
Collector's Pynchon, Salinger Letters to Remain Sealed
for Now












=====
<http://www.pynchonoid.blogspot.com/>

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