SLSL Intro "Almost But Not Quite Me ..."

[William Zantzinger]

--- jbor <jbor at bigpond.com> wrote:
> McHoul & Wills:
> 
> > the text itself calls
> > explicitly 'a strategy of transfer' ([SL, "Intro,"
> p.]
> > 21)
> 
> The context of Pynchon's use of this phrase in the
> 'Introduction' is
> criticism rather than endorsement, however:
> 
> "Why I adopted such a strategy of transfer is no
> longer clear to me." (21)
> 
> Pynchon is discussing 'TSI' and the "old Baedeker
> trick again" of shifting
> his own Long Island "hometown ... landscape and the
> experiences I grew up
> with" to the Berkshires (20-21). In fact, what he's
> overtly saying he's not
> doing, and what McHoul & Wills seem to be trying to
> say he is doing, is
> adopting this "strategy of transfer" in the 'Intro'.
> It's quite a bizarre
> tactic on the critics' part, shamelessly ignoring
> the semantic thrust and
> context of Pynchon's commentary. Of course, in the
> context of what he means
> by the phrase, Pynchon's personal recounts and
> reminiscences in the 'Intro'
> don't deliberately displace his own experiences at
> all. These are
> acknowledged precisely for what they are.

It may seem bizarre to some but these guys are
certainly no the first to do something like this. The
word transference is simply a key they fashion and
turn to open the door into a Freudian reading of the
Intro. 
Is it shameless? No really. Is the Freudian reading
any good? Not really. It's pretty obvious that P is
both accepting responsibility for the flaws in the
tales and in his youthful person when he wrote them
and shoving these flaws off on that other guy he can't
quite 86 from his life. Knowing that he can't quite 86
the other guy, he defends him even as he finds him
guilty. He exposes warts even as he uses suggestion
therapy on the reader to make them disappear. 
That sentence about racial differences is a good
example of how slippery Pynchon can be. Unless he
really thinks of himself as a person of color in
America, that sentence makes no sense at all.
Moreover, the positionof the sentece, between his sin
and his apology is troublesome. 

Does Heff have Watusi blood? 



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