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

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73104&sort=date

Still more 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 ...

"'Transference' is, perhaps, particularly suitable as
a tehory of meaning for a text which is avowedly
autobiographical and almost confessional.  It
certainly does a deal of apologising, of begging for
forgiveness while at the same time asking taht the one
who is forgiven be taken as distinct from the one who
now speaks and amkes a perfect tarnsfer.  That old
one, that one in the past who was also the young one,
is associated with all sorts of crimes ... of every
literary and moral crime under the sun ....  The
present Pynchon apologises for the past one.  This new
one exculpates himself from all these crimes,
admitting only a small misdemeanour:

... chase scenes, for which I remain a dedicated
sucker .... ({SL, "Intro," p.] 19)" (p. 147)

Cf. ...

"He went to Mass and confessed, though to what would
be a mystery."

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=9610&msg=7420&sort=date

http://www.cafecancun.com/bookarts/pynchon.htm

And back to McHoul and Wills ...

"So this text has a peculiar confessional mode--one
where the symptoms of moral and literary
transgressions are offered up as those of someone
else.... our first Freudian sense of 'transference'
(Ubertragung): the transfer of symptoms of feeling 'on
to a contemporary object ... which applied, and still
unconsciously apply, to an infantile object', where
the classic instance of such a contemporary object is
that most immediately available in the analytic
confession, the analyst him- or herself.... Or: one
can take on another's transferred symptoms to oneself.
 Pynchon's 'Introduction' appears to want to
transfer--in this sense--in reverse, to offloadf all
problems on to a past self so that the present self is
cleansed and, in turn, transferred into the reading
space in pritine form.  A double transfer: blame
backwards, resultant purity forwards.
   "However, there is a second meaning of the same
term (Ubertragung) in Freud: the transference of a
repressed wish.  Here and idea or feeling moves from
one place to another ... 'within' the same
patient--though ... the concepts of 'within/without'
and 'patient/text' can easily slip around; and so the
term 'transfer/ence' becomes subject to the very
slippage and play that it describes." (p. 148)

   "In the case of the first meaning, an historical
dimension is in play--the dimension of the very past
and present 'selves' that Pynchon's 'Introduction'
inhabits--one very much the analyst of the other.  And
although the Pynchon of the 50s is hardly 'infantile'
in teh strict sense (despite confessiong to a lsating
'puerility'), he is often characterised that way by
teh analyst/narrator of the 'Introduction'.  The two
emanings of 'transference' ... could then be read
together to suggest a single general process operating
simultaneously in two distinct planes: roughly a
synchrronic (unconscious --> presconscious) and a
diachronic (infantile --> contemporary) plane. 
Transference thus does a double duty, bringing
together as it does the apparentlyu contradictory
problematics of hiding or covering up and of
disclosure or bringing to presence." (pp. 148-9)

"'Transference' can therefore mean something more than
and different from the simpler idea of transfer ... in
the sense of making perfect copies.  It si not (only)
this simple, mythic (albeit widespread) theory of
meaning, predicated on ameness and on the arrival of
the text at its destination, whole and unsullied.  It
must now imply that by virtue of and within any case
of transference, meaning must slip around from place
to place, text to text, person to pesron in quite
unpredictable ways." (p. 149)

"... in the case of the 'Introduction', the polarity
of difference is switched to that of transference
itself....  Some sameness, identity, 'gets through'. 
It moves from author to reader ....  Something ...
passes.  To pass is to transfer ....  But ... to pass
is also to fake.  And so we must be aware of the
faking that stands behind every transference, of the
essentially fictitious nature of all writing--of the
fact that it is not what it purports to represent ....
 A mythically pure transfer would ideally elide the
signifier and the signified; while transference would
insist only that some element or symptom of the
signified pass over, exactly, on to the side of the
signifier.  Transference is a theory of meaning which
risks looking like, resembling realism (or pure
transfer): and it is precisely its aspect as
resemblance that is important and not any
understanding it may have of itself as realism pure
and simple." (p. 150)

   "The symbolism of transference does not assume a
structuralist a priori equality between whatever terms
are enetred into it.  And, more radically, it suggests
that complete opposites are never actually
encountered, but are the consequences of thinking with
ideal systems ....  Transference appears to preserve
difference much more that difference allows for
transference....  The 'Introduction', and this is our
central point, does not take us this far.  On the
contrary.  And yet it does open up teh space in which
it can be thought.  It opens up a speace between sheer
identity and sheer difference" 'a strategy of
transfer'([SL, "Intro," p.] 21)." (p. 153)

"... this strategy ... means a good deal of risk.  It
emans, for example, the risk of being accused of
theft: the very literary theft which is confessed in
the 'Introduction'....  There is always the hint of a
crime--the idea that someone or something deliberately
intervened to prevent perfect transfer.  Or else the
opposite ... getting meaning in one's stories by the
tactic of imitative recognisability ... by making some
narrative details identical ... to risk the charge of
wholesale theft; of appropriating that which was
successfully transfered ....  The two crimes: theft of
the remainder and theft of the absent, almost seem to
cancel one another.  Already we want to call
plagiarism 'intertextuality', or else the opposite. 
And we want to call literary 'oversight' something
like 'the impossibility of complete description'.  Or
else the opposite.  There is the crime of an always
imperfect authenticity ... and the crime of neglecting
this ....  The situation makes every writing a crime. 
The two crimes ... do not yet cancel one another. 
There is ... no innocent writing." (pp. 153-4)

TO BE CONTINUED (AGAIN) ...

... but, again, in the meantime, do see ...

Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) ...

http://www.psywww.com/books/interp/toc.htm

http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/Freud/Dreams/

http://psychology.about.com/library/classics/blfreud_dream.htm

... esp. Chs. II and VII.E.  And see as well ...

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/f_intdre.html

http://www.haverford.edu/psych/ddavis/p109g/fgloss.html

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