SLSL Intro: "if...I were...him"

[Mutualcode at aol.com]

       On the other hand, if through some as yet undeveloped
       technology I were to run into him today...

He wouldn't be the same after the meeting would he, and the future
would be changed, which is probably impossible. But the Intro
narrator has nearly succeeded in doing something similar with
good old fashioned word play. That is, he has suggested that 
the person who wrote these stories is, or was, someone else,
who can be referred to in the third person. It is that device, I think,
which reflects back on the narrator, and serves to underscore the
sense that this may be a "persona." If the real author of these
apprentice pieces is someone other than the narrator, who is the
author of V., or GR, w/r/t this narrator?

It's subtle, to be sure, but the seeds of doubt have been planted;
and although we know it's just another typical Pynchon move- 
cozying up to the audience- hell, joining us as we examine "this
guy" he's given a reprieve to- it still smacks a bit of coercion on
the narrator's part, to get us to give the stories themselves a 
reprieve, while suggesting how to criticize them.

Maybe he was a bad writer back then, who lucked out by being
on the cusp of when the standards of what constituted "good"
writing changed somehow, by and through those influences he
sights, yet awaiting something new, which, as luck and timing
would have it, he was able to supply.

respectfully

K-T-P  
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