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

[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

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0211&msg=73108&sort=date

And finishing up in 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 ...

"There is still a further way we can write this
problematic of transference.... what is true of
identity must also be true of its opposite,
non-identity....  non-identity is, of course, nothing
other than difference.... trannference is not merely a
third term to add to identity and difference....  It
changes the meaning of that oppositionality." (p. 154)

"... one's identity, one's selfhood is written into
being .... transference implies the importance of some
degree of sameness ....  Hence one's identity ...
cannot emerge from a pure play of difference ....  It
always contains the grain of the immediate, of the
non-deferred.  There is always at least a residuum of
presence.
   "However, transference does not fool itself that
the meaning, the message, or whatever, passes across
the abyss without any kind of loss whatsoever; from
sender to receiver without change.  Adestinational
transference ... always allows both for the
possibility that some things will never reach their
destination. and for the possibility that,
nevertheless, some things do or can.... the
teleological and the anti-teleological are equally
untenable." (p. 155)

"... the theory of transference makes a very different
cut from that of difference, and it also makes that
cut in a different direction.... (1) the self is
written into being, but some element of the self must
already be available for this to occur; (2) the play
of difference which creates the self in writing,
contains some trace of identity; (3) the metaphysical
self is the product of a purelay semantic prosess, yet
that process is never utterly free of the metaphysics
of presence.
   "Is this a return to a theory of meaning as
consciousness?  A phenomenology?  Essentialy no: or
else it is a post-phenomenology...." (p. 156)

   "All that transference requires is that something
is sent from being a to being b ....  This something
that is sent is perhaps in toto a different something
from what arrives....  The thing that arrives may even
be an absence...." (p. 156)

   "In the case of Pynchon, we can see how acute this
potential contradiction is when we realise that the
'Introduction' itself locates the meaning of the
subsequent stories in transference-as-intertextuality
(theft, plagiarism) as a means of refusing to face up
to the meanings of the text(s) as autobiographic
transfer.  The intertextual transference defers the
autobiographical: and yet at the same time the very
text of the 'Introduction' is itself in the mode of
autobiography.  What is denied is manifestly present
...." (p. 156)

"This 'Introduction' ... makes it quite clear that
autobiography has much to do with fiction: it is
fiction (if not vice versa); one's life is always
already a fictional regardless of how it is
written....  And the 'Introduction' is a central piece
of autobiographical fiction.  It is in this light that
we can understand what has been glossed as Pynchon's
silence about himself .... in one sense, there has
been no silence.  Pynchon only ever wrote
autobiography." (p. 157)

"The 'Introduction' asks us not to throw out the
transference baby with the total-identity bathwater."
(p. 157)

"The author's problem in the 'Introduction' to Slow
Learner is that he both does and doesn't recognise the
signature as his own.  Those stories he has signed
like a cheque and the chequered career of 'bad ear',
'puerility', racism, sexism and proto-Fascism,
shirt-changing, overwriting, theft, bad habits and
dumb theories bouncing around here, have all been
debited to his account.  Now he'd prefer not to
countersign them ....  He sets the record straight by
means of confession, self-criticism, of both apology
and apologia.  Now what he writes will not be marked
by the same bad ear, puerility, racism, sexism and so
on.  It was almost but not quite me who wrote that
back then.
   "The 'Introduction' to Slow Learner mentions almost
all of pynchon's published fiction....  On the other
hand 'Mortality and Mercy in Vienna' gets left out at
one end of his production and Gravity's Rainbow at the
other.  The problem then is: does he also sign for
these others here ... who should we imagine to have
been their author?
   "So we come to asking again ... who is this first
person ...?  Can we expect to find his identity formed
through the different writing selves that are
scattered throughout this short text?  And the answer
obviously is that there is no answer to that sort of
paradox, since the writing slef, as soon as it writes
... ruins its own identity and becomes forever an
author of fictions only." (p. 159)

"there is one fault that is marked by the sort of
physicality that might allow positive identification
....  It is his 'bad ear'.  It is the first fault
mentioned and the idea returns on the last pages .... 
One might reasonably assume that the first mistake ...
continues to haunt the writer of the 'Introduction.'"
(p. 159)

"... but the real question here is whether one Thomas
can recognise himself any more than any other....  The
confusion between author and narrator, the difficulty
in recognising the difference, or wanting to almost
but not quite annul the difference, has led to the
introducer's own admission, to acts of bad faith in
the stories themselves....  one thing stands out as
distinguishing mark, namely this bad ear.  At the
beginning of the end then, is the matter of a
mutilated body, the event of someone showing off an
organ that wasn't his own and doubt about both the
fact and victim of a mutilation....  The
Pynchon-narrator-introducer who almost but not quite
signs the text in question here, didvides it as he
signs it, is countersignes by a recidivist doubting
Thomas [the initials 'd' and 'T' here italicized in
the text] whose initials provide the signature for a
whole range of fictions ...." (pp. 159-6)

Hm ...

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0111&msg=62723&sort=date

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0111&msg=62724&sort=date

And see as well ...

Alec McHoul's Gravity's Rainbow Summary ...

http://members.aol.com/russillosm/grsummary.html

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