SLSL Intro "The Way of Communication"

[Fergus Ginsberg]

--- Keith McMullen <keithsz at concentric.net> wrote:
> 
> "Finally, and above all, a great writer is always a
> great enchanter, and it
> is here that we come to the really exciting part
> when we try to grasp the
> individual magic of his genius and to study the
> style, the imagery, the
> pattern of his novels or poems." (Nabokov)


All of the flaws Pynchon talks about in his
Introduction are taken up by Nabokov's lectures. (Not
to mention some of the  traps that readers can fall
into when when reading a book-usually the first read-
with the head and not the spine) Nobikov doesn't
discuss his own apprentice works however. He lectures
on Austen, Joyce, Kafka, Dickens, Proust, Stevenson,
Flaubert. He talks about style. Austen's, for example.
And he give general adive to prospective
writer/readers as he reads the stories with them. 
He notes the lack of inagery in Austen's drawing room
novels, but he talks about her unique style and
surmises that it it probably a product of French
influence.  

Elements of Strunken White Style 

"Style is not a tool, it is not a method, it is not a
choice of words alone." 

Not words alone. Pynchon recognizes that his tales are
weak partly because of the language and style. 

And he would have been better off avoiding the
thesaurus (a tool too often abused by young writers)
and sticking with a good dictionary. 

He talks about the wonderful imagery in Dickens' Bleak
House. 

And he finds a flaw in Bleak House (Esther's Book)
that is sort of what Pynchon  discovers in his tale
"The Small Rain", but of course Bleak House is not an
apprentice's short story. 

Pynchon says, the narrator is "almost but not quite
me" 
page 5, SL Intro.

Pynchon read Conrad, T. S. Eliot and so on and so
forth and yet he makes this apprentice error.  It's
fundamental. What's ironic is that another sailor told
this tale to Pynchon and yet he doesn't follow
Conrad's example and create a narrative distance. A
distince that  would open the tale up to all sorts of
(ironic...etc) possibilities.  Pynchon does this in
the novel V. with his Stencil narratives. 

On the Patterns, I like the list he goes through on
Joyce's Ulysses. These show up in GR. 















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