SLSL Intro "It is only fair to warn ..."

[edwin honigire]

Thinking about Conrad's famous Preface to _NN_ not so
much because it is anything like Pynchon's rather lame
Introduction, that is if one reads it as some here are
suggesting, as a work of irony with a character or
narrator or whatever (compare the famous preface of
Cervantes' DQ if you want to argue some depricating
irony and I think Malignd makes a very good when he
points us to Roth's semi-autobigraphical
self-parodies, that Pynchon has not made himself or
even his youthful self a character), but because it is
famous for what it says about showing and not
telleing, about hearing, feeling, reading and writing.
And SEEING.   The characters are not the only weakness
in these apprentice works. Pynchon closes the eyes of
the reader. Or we wince, our eyes shut tight against
the too bright lights of a young author trying too
hard to shine like that green light at the end of
Gatsby's dock. 

A bit from James Wood: 

Eyes Wide Shut 
By JAMES WOOD
Dreaming by the Book  by Elaine Scarry 
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 292 pp.


 "My task which I am trying to achieve is, by the
 power of the written word, to make you hear, to make
 you feel--it is, before all, to make you see," writes
 Conrad in his famous preface to The Nigger of the
 Narcissus. Making us see, in its fullest sense, is
 literature's central project, and there is no
critical
 inquiry more interesting, and more acute to writers
  themselves, than how this is done, and why one piece
  of literature succeeds at Conrad's task, and why
 another fails. Being inherently a discourse of
failure
 and success, such an inquiry has about it an aroma of
 connoisseurship, and it is largely eschewed by
 contemporary criticism. But it is one of those rare
 areas in which writers exhaust criticism, and have
 much to say of their own--indeed, in which the
  greatest writers have great things to say, most of
 them agreeing, for instance, that literature builds  
 imaginary "worlds" in many different ways, but
 universally through its use of detail, of Blake's
"minute particulars," of what Schiller counsels as
that genius whereby "when most enthusiastic for the
Whole," the  great writer "preserves a coolness, a
patience defying all obstacles, as regards details,"
of what Coleridge calls "those fine hair-strokes of
exquisite judgment peculiar to Shakespeare," of what
Nabokov cooingly  woos as "the divine details." 

Elaine Scarry's book is a book....

I have to wonder as Eliane does, why did Pynchon sell
this book? The Intro tells us the tales are bad and
the Intro itself is not very useful to writers. Hell,
would you include this Intro ina workshop for young
writers? Not when there are hundreds of other essays
that are much better. NO, I don't like it. Irony my
ass. This is abook to fill a long publishing drought
and remind the reader that Pynchon has not fallen of
run off the edge of the literary world. He seems to be
promoting VL a bit too. Right? 

Sorry, 

Edwin

See the preface to DQ below. It's a dandy. 

What did Nabokov have to do with it? 
Next. 


http://www.online-literature.com/cervantes/don_quixote/3/





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