SLSL Intro "A Couple-Three Bonzos"

[Dave Monroe]

'Cos I finally have it in hand again, from Terry
Reilly, "A Couple-Three Bonzos: 'Introduction,' Slow
Learner and 1984," Pynchon Notes 44-45 (Spring-Fall
1999), pp. 5-13 ...

   "In 1984, teachers, critics and other Pynchon
enthusiasts, myself included, greeted Little, Brown's
publication of Slow Learner with unbridled joy.  No
longer would we have to scrounge for these
hard-to-find stories ....  Further, Slow Learner
included a wonderful introduction in which the
enigmatic Mr. Pynchon finally came forth to comment on
his own life and work, as we had all hoped he would
someday.  The first reading of the introduction
provided a sense of comfort and gemutlichkeit rarely
experienced by critics or professors.  Pynchon had
surfaced, and we were there." (p. 5)

   "Many reviewers warmly greeted the 'disarming and
candid Introduction' (as the jacket flap of the
Little, Brown edition describes it)....  Richard
Poirier, however, wrote that Pynchon's 'jaunty
complaints in the Introduction that the stories in
Slow Learner fail to provide full, lifelike characters
are ... so curious and irrelevant as to suggest either
that he is kidding--and I'm afraid he isn't--or that
he is tired' ....  These comments all call attention
to what was arguably the most powerful effect iof the
introduction on an initial reading.  The weirdly
generous tone and mood, at once confessional,
contrite, apologetic and nostalgic, combined with teh
simple, halting style, evoked (and for many confirmed)
images of a tired, burned-out Pynchon, a victim of
excesses both imagined and reconstructed ...." (p. 5)

   "The Introduction implies that the title Slow
Learner refers, of course, to Pynchon's growth as a
literary figure ....  Poirier concludes that 'Pynchon
does not want anyone to think that this volume in any
way sufficiently represents him....'  Poirier is taken
in ....  Along with Poirier, we appreciate Pynchon's
candor ....  Yet even on a first reading, there is
something wrong, something phony, something very
disturbing about the introducton.
   "In the chapter 'Almost but not quite me ...' of
Writing Pynchon [q.v.], Alec McHoul and David Wills
first questioned the believability of conventional
approaches to the introduction in Slow Learner.... 
they warn that 'tempting as it may be, we ought
perhaps to resist reading the 'Introduction' as the
key to the stories which follow it' ....  The way to
'fend off' such a reading, they argue, is through 'the
heuristic of calling the "Introduction" itself a story
in the collection' ...." (p. 6)   

"I argue that Pynchon took the title Slow Learner from
Orwell's 1984 and that the narrative voice of
'Introduction' is a reshaping of the voices of Ronald
Reagan and the reformed Winston Smith. Read not a s a
traditional introduction but rather as a short story
or metafictional short stry, 'Introduction' emerges as
an experiment in narative, shaped in Pynchon's version
of Newspeak.... a caricature or parodic miniature of
confessional language in America in 1984--Reaganspeak
or Reaganese.  'Introduction' is a piece of subversive
nostalgia, and in Slow Learner, Pynchon challenges and
critiques traditional narrative forms.
   "Pynchon's interest in history, literature,
paranoia, and relations between individuals and the
state makes his interest in 1984 and Orwell's 1984
understandable.  Vineland, for example, although
published in 1990, takes place in 1984 ...." (pp. 6-7)

  "In Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith's job at the
Ministry of Truth is that of revisionist historian....
 a fiction writer, one who fictionalizes history .... 
Conversely, in his private life, he keeps a diary in
which he historicizes fiction ... 'Who controls the
past controls the future; who controls the present
conrols the past' ....
   "After Smith's diary is discovered, he is brought
to Room 101 in the Ministry of loev and tortured...."
(p. 7)

"Finally, O'Brien asks Smith to reinterpret what he
wrote in his diary--in effect, to revise his own
autobiographical writings to bring them into line with
Party language and ideology." (p. 8)

   "If Pynchon took the title Slow Learner from1984,
and if 'Introduction' is a confession of revisionist
autobiography, its logic is characterized by the
post-torture forgetfulness, non sequiturs and other
logical fallacies Winston Smith experiences and learns
not to queston....  in 'Introduction'--what we might
call Pynchon's secret reintegration--Pynchon makes
some rather startling comments about his writing
which, on close reading, are either questionable or
very doubtful...." (p. 8)

   "Euphemisms and buzz phrases like 'unacceptable
level,' 'level of clarity' (3), 'forms of wrong
procedure' (17), 'derive' in lieu of steal (18), etc.
abound in 'Introducton,' and they both echo and
curously prefigure the language Messrs' North,
Poindexter, McFarland and others used during th
Iran-Contra hearings ...." (p. 9)

   "But the most pervasive, most identifiable and most
humorous voice in 'Introduction' takes shape from the
language (and perhaps persona) Ronald Reagan used to
distnace himself from involvement in Iran-Contra. 
Pynchon the Reaganesque narrator is forgetful, from
the opening line--'As nearly as I can remember'
...--to the end of the penultimate paragraph ....  In
between, Pynchon tells us he was 'an unpolitical '50's
student' ...." (p. 10)

   "Pynchon attributes much of his ignorance and
misunderstanding, like Reagan, to his 'Bad Ear' ..."
(p. 10)

"In 'Introduction,' however, Pynchon toys with his
readers using yet another narrative trap....  I think
it safe to say that Pynchon's styland form here have
something to do with Reaganspeak as a typ of
quasi-unitary language (in the Bakhtinian sense) of
the mid-1980's, and with the Public Confession (aka
Kiss and Tell) as the epistemological form most
closely associated with 'truth' during that decade.
   "Confession as a genre has historically included
actual and/or simulated autobiographical events...."
(p. 10)

"... the resonance of and allusions to 1984 in
'Introduction' suggest that Pynchon's text takes shape
from what may described as coerced, imaginary or
intentionally false confessions....  allusions to 1984
mediate the distnace between Pynchon the writer and
'Pynchon' the narrator of (and character in)
'Introduction' by insising that the confession may be
both corced and false." (p. 11)

"The Reaganspeak which gives shape to the
'Inroduction' resonates beyond the narrative to
implicate the publisher as well...." (p. 11)

"The word to be emphasized here is '"pretend,"'
because much of 'Introduction' seeks to blur the
interface between reality and fiction,a nd between
truth and falsehood, much as Orwell' concept of
doublethink does in 1984...." (p. 12)

   "In a clear example of this Orwellian/Reaganesque
doublethink, Pynchon says, 'Somewhere I had come up
with the notion taht one's personal life had nothing
to do with fiction, when the truth, as everyone knows,
is nearly the direct opposite' ....  Such a link
between fiction and autobiography characterizes
'Introduction' as a literary hybrid akin to the phony
letters, prefaces, introductions, certificates of
authenticity, and so on that appear in many
eighteent-cetury novels ... and, of course, Mason &
Dixon.  In 'Introduction,' Pynchon provides us with a
parodic simulacrum of himself, an image of what we
might imagine him to be, saying what we think he might
say about himself and his writings ...." (p. 12)

After which follows an egregious error concerning "The
Intro and the Outro" by The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band ...

I'll be posting from ...

McHoul, Alec and David Wills.  Writing Pynchon:
   Strategies in Fictional Analysis.  Urbana:
   U of Illinois P, 1990.

Soonly, but see also ...

Poirier, Richard.  "Humans."  Rev. of Slow Learner.
   London Review of Books 24 (Jan. 1985): 18-20.

As well as, e.g., ...

http://www.themodernword.com/pynchon/pynchon_reviews.html

http://www.ottosell.de/pynchon/slslindex.html

But do note, the opinions expresssed above (Reilly) do
not necesarily reflect ...

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