SLSL Intro "Our Common Nightmare"

[Wasted Words]

--- Mutualcode at aol.com wrote:
> 
> These "absence questions-" of The Holocaust in GR,
> of the
> holocaust of HIV in Vineland- that haunt Pynchon's
> works,
> seem to be alluding to a larger question about the
> nature
> of reality. 

What absense questions? These things are either in the
novels or not. If they are not in the novels how can
they possibly haunt P's works?  There is simply no
reason to expect P to include or exclude these things
in any novel he writes. The nature of reality, indeed
reality itself,  need never come into a novel. In
fact, that is why we read novels instead of histories
and the like. Readers don't need novels to bombard
them with holocaust, the daily events of our lives are
filled with horror stories, of war, murder, rape,
pilage, famine, suffering of the innocent...just keep
reading this list and you'll get your fill of the
villanious machinations and maniacal cruelty of the
criminally insane who  make the papers every day. Why
pick up an ovel expecting it to be haunted by HIV or
the Holocaust? Murdering people is evil. HIV is
horror. 

Do we need Macbeth to teach us what evil is? 
No. 

In some great fictions, even the most permenant values
(i.e., murdering an innocent old woman is evil or
murdering a stranger for no appartent reason is evil)
are challanged by the non-conventional expression of
the events that lead up to these acts of evil or by
the unconventional reactions of the characters to
them. 

The Stranger, Crime and Punishment, Mondaugan's Story
in V. 

In each of these tales there is an absense and a
haunting. We could even say that the novels are
haunted by an absense, but what is missing is not some
event we should expect to be present because the tales
are ostensibly about WWII or 1980s California life or
whatever. 

We may expect a conventional plot and be pleasently
amused when we don't get one. We expect a climax and
never reach one. We may expect a conventional
character and we may be led to believe that we have
one until he/she turns out not be so. We may expect
character action and get none. We may expect a
community ethic and discover there is none. A
character may expect to be tracked down by the police
and arrested for a murder but no one persues him. The
list goes on and on but we expect these things or not
because the novelist and or narrator(s), through
various methods (sometimes simply by  appealing to our
conventional or shared views of things like murder and
sometimes via not so conventional methods) invites us
to expect or not to expect these things in the world
he/she has created. 
Reality is what you get when you walk out of MAdison
Square Garden with salt on your face and a Circus
Program and pick up The Times, but while you're
sitting there watching a man stick his head in a
lion's mouth you should not be thinking about reality
one little bit cause it ain't real kid. 








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