SLSL Intro "Almost But Not Quite Me ..." CONT'D

[Dave Monroe]

   "At the heart of the story, most crucial and
worrisome, is the defective way in which my narrator,
almost but not quite me ...." (SL, "Intro," p. 5)

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73102&sort=date

Continuing from Alec McHoul and David Wills, Writing
Pynchon: Strategies in Fictional Analysis (Urbana: U
of Illinois P, 1990), Ch. 5, "Almost But Not Quite Me
...," pp. 131-62 ...

"... the issue here is quite other than one of tracing
the 'real' biographical origins of Pynchon.  Instead
... the problem of 'What signs?" would initially be a
discursive/signatory one: how to arrange the 'voices',
or more strictly 'writing positions' ... of the
text?....  There appears to be a now-narrator
addressing a possibly fictional then-author ....  The
'I' which never calls itself 'Thomas Pynchon' ... does
double duty--shuffling back and forth from
now-narrator to then-author/character." (p. 140)

"It can be objected that: surely one talks of oneself
this way--this is the mode after all of autobiography.
 Indeed it is that mode and, moreover, the
now-narrator attempts with arguable success to put as
much moral and literary distance between himself and
this then-author as possible.  It should always be
clear from the tense and the active/passive switching
who is speaking or writing.  The two signatures should
be different.  But are they?" (p. 141)

"... every time we attempt to address the question of
signature, of 'Pynchon', 'author', 'I', the writing or
speaking position, and so on, we come up against a
decision as to the theory of meaning we are prepared
to enetertain.  On the traditional model, the question
of author is solved instantly ... by evoking a
psychological theory of meaning: roughly the
concoction of meaning 'in the mind', its transmission
via the text, its reception 'in the mind' of the
reader and so on ....  In the case of the
'Introduction' this could be: I-now vs. I-then.... the
category of author can be treated in terms of a theory
or theories of meaning.  The traditional step in
searching for a text's meaning has been to turn to its
authorship.... this concept of authorship has always
been a proxy for a theory of meaning.  The
author-search has ... deferred the more basic textual
problem we pose here." (pp. 141-2)

"... consider how author-as-theory-of-meaning emerges
at two familiar sites: the biography and the
scientific resaerch report.  The first instance must
include autobiography.... the autobiography contains a
particular and relatively unique assumption: namely
that the meaning of the text is the preservation or
conservation of (some)oneself, or at least features of
oneself across spatial and historical gaps." (p. 142)

   "On the other hand, the science report's theory of
its own meaning is such that it would efface its
authorship.  It does so by a convention: namely that
third-person, largely passive, forms of writing delete
all traces of narration, with that deletion equated
with the removal of authorship....  Science writing
attempts to depersonalise itself, to present truth
.... " (pp. 142-3)

   "The problem ... has to do with the position of
truth and its guarantess.  Biography guarantees truth
through appeals to singular experiences....  While
scientific reporatage also requires appeals to ...
experience, teh criterion of truth is whether the
report is made in conformity with ... self-eveident
truths.  Where biography's meaning derives from an
appeal to highly singular specifics, science texts
derive meaning from the fit of observations into an
abstarct scheme .... even instances of a genre such as
autobiography which turns upon the singular and the
unique does so within a structure of repetition and
imitability, if only because 'singularity' can be as
much an institutional truth criterion as the more
belabouredly 'public' crietria of science." (pp.
143-4)

"In connection with our formulation of
'author'-as-theory-of-meaning, then: does the
'Introduction' offer a particular variant of this
biographical theory (or institution) of meaning? ....
we should expect to find a ... plurality of authors or
readings of authorship.  Under what conditions do such
readings get made? ... we are very strongly compelled
towards a particular reading, if we take into account
the long period of silence on Pynchon's part, its
atypicality in literary circles ... and the massive
temptation to read the 'Introduction' as the breaking
of this silence.  This cuts off ,amy of the possible
readings of authorship available.  It constrains us to
read the 'Introduction' as an author-biography with
some form of privilieged insight into the (other)
stories of Slow Learner.... what in turn guarantees
the reading?...  We could read the 'Introduction' as
but another story.  Then our problematic could be: how
do the various first persons, the several 'I's of the
text, conceive their own textual positions?
   "Working this way, something becomes very eveident
right away: the basic assumption of structuralist
lingusitics (that meaning arises out of difference) is
not one which is much shared by the 'Introduction'....
 The 'Introduction' asks for a separation bewteen
itself and the stories that follow.  They, teh
stories, are deferred in their historical action. 
They exist in the space of a dialectic bewteen reading
(now) and narration (then).  One has to wait for
history to catch up.... an historical mediation which
guarantess thier difference.  They are not marked as
'present'....  This is how to read the stories,
according to the 'Introduction': with a retrospective
knowledge to fill the differential between then and
now.  If this sis the space of the stories, how does
the 'Introduction' situate itself?
   "This is another story.  The 'Introduction' would
have us believe that it arrives all of a sudden; that
it comes at once, im-mediately.  It does not gather
its meaning from difference but from sameness,
identity with itself, from immediate presence, from
the 'true voice' of a cllapsed author/narrator calling
itself 'I' and using the present tense.  This present
'Pynchon' ... is meaningful by virtue of its
differentiation from the old 'Pynchon'....  the
difference between same and difference--between
immediacy and deferral.... a theory of meaning which
is other than that based on difference.... The
'Introduction', in its various ways, is, then, now,
very logocentric.
   "At least it wants to be.  But can it be? .... if
the text does not realise this, we have to ask
ourselves just what it does realise.  Here, at last,
we have come to the question of transference.
   "The spearation ... is one between meaning as
difference and meaning as transference.... a concept
over which the two theories centrally diasgree: the
concept of identity....  The very idea of an
introduction ... marks a discolsure of identity. 
Which one?  In the case of Slow Learner the only name
is that on the cover....  We assume we're being
introduced to a 'Thomas Pynchon' ....
   "But on the other hand, there's another meaning of
'identity' which has ... more to do with abstract
conceptions of what's what.  We use 'identity', that
is, not simply to address the question of who someone
is but also to address questions of sameness ....  The
'Introduction' itself always appears to be trying to
pass off the Pynchon who writes as identical with the
one we read....  If that Pynchon, or one of 'his'
narrators, was 'almost but not quite me', well then
this one must be 'exactly me'....  It makes the
problem look as if it goes away ....  And it's this
propensity for making an apparently exact copy that we
caled earlier ... the myth of transfer.  The
'Introduction''s theory of meaning turns on
transference, on the making of perfect copies, on
immediacy, on complete identity of vthe original with
the copy." (pp. 143-7)

TO BE CONTINUED ...

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